


Calm & the Black-Stained Sky

by sageness



Category: due South
Genre: Canada, Canon - TV, Case Fic, Community: ds_c6d_bigbang, Established Relationship, Firefighters, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-14
Updated: 2009-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:52:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageness/pseuds/sageness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for DS_C6D Big Bang 2009: Two years post-COTW, Fraser is promoted to corporal & RayK becomes a volunteer firefighter in a small town in Yukon Territory—a small town with a spot of arson on its hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calm & the Black-Stained Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the first Due South/C6D Big Bang. Thanks to China Shop, WaltzforaNight, and FairestCat for beta-reading and to Nos and Salieri for helping with background info. Thanks also to everyone, especially SisterofDream, TheComingNight, and Mergatrude, who offered support.
> 
> Disclaimer: A) Lupine Pass is fictional; the Pelly Mountains are not. B) All characters besides Dief, RayK, and Fraser are my creations. C) Despite a lot of research, I'm sure there are factual errors here. Please accept my apologies if I screwed up anything important.
> 
> Please go check out the [Art by Omphale and Nyn17 and the story's two soundtracks](http://slowestbigbang.com/storypages/sage.html)! :D

  


  


The true keeps calm biding its story stop  
The arsonist's perspiration stains the sky black please

—Rusty Morrison  


*  


Harley leaned against a tall black spruce and watched. Her brother was visible through the gaps in the rotting timbers of the cabin, his long dark hair tied in a greasy ponytail, his green knit cap stuffed into his jacket pocket. He set the fire and his ridiculous Anarchy symbol erupted instantly into flames, but they died down fast. He hadn't lit a wall or anything yet. Floors were thick and hard to burn through; but, no, the fire was catching and beginning to spread. Maybe Teague was stretching it out so they could enjoy it longer before they had to run.

An animal rustled in the forest behind her. Something small: probably a rabbit, or maybe a fox. She could smell the smoke now, and if she could, then the animals could and were wracking their tiny little brains to see whether it was time to hightail it out of there. There were bird cries, too, from the ones that hadn't gone south yet. Harley heard a raven send up its distinctive alarm and heard the wildlife around them subtly shift back, away from them, away from the fire. She straightened up silently and listened hard; the tree pulled strands of black hair out of her ponytail. For a moment she was afraid that a bear or a moose would get curious and try to make trouble. A grizzly could make a lot of trouble, especially if it wanted to snack on the fleeing animals. Or them.

But then Teague leapt off the porch with a shout of joy and a tower of flame dancing behind him in the center of the cabin's main room. The fire was creating its own wind, and small bits of debris were blowing back and forth inside. Entranced, Harley forgot about the forest and watched the fire feed, devouring the old hewn logs with a crackling roar. So beautiful. And it grew so quickly.

The exposed timbers of the roof began to smolder, and a black spot appeared above the main fire. It was going too fast. It was going to be over too soon. Teague was standing next to her then, and she could smell the soot and ash on him. She grabbed the open flap of his jacket and pulled it to her face, inhaling deeply.

"Freak," he said with affection in his voice.

"It takes one to know one."

"We need to clean up." He shoved his upper arm against her shoulder until she shoved back. It was time, he was right. But it felt so good to watch stuff burn. Especially stuff people built and then abandoned like it didn't matter. It was like cremating people or something. Or maybe taking vengeance for their waste. Wood gone to waste. A homestead gone to waste. All that effort gone to waste.

The ground was cold but not yet frozen, and there wasn't any snow at the moment. Teague kicked around some pine needles in four or five random places, and then they set off. Five minutes later they were at the river, climbing into their little canoe and paddling upstream toward home. Halfway there, they paused in a wide place to catch a few fish for dinner. "Five bucks says she doesn't even notice," Harley said.

Teague scoffed. "That's a sucker bet. I wonder if she's home."

"Wonder if she's sober."

"Wonder if she's conscious."

"Wonder if she—"

"—remembers we exist?"

"I was going to say I wonder if she's cleaned the kitchen so we can cook these up without having to put on hazmat suits."

Teague laughed. "The grill's clean?" His teeth shone bright in the dying sunlight. Harley paddled in time with her brother, feeling good, energized by the fire.  


*  


Two months later  


The front door opened with an icy scrape and then banged shut on a gust of frozen wind; on Hockey Night, the Canucks were winning by two in maybe the most boring hockey game Ray had seen since he left Chicago. He heard Fraser methodically stripping off his layers in the hall, and then Fraser's voice: "Well, it seems Diefenbaker has decided to spend the night out of doors after all."

"Good. Took him long enough to choose," Ray said, glancing up as a penalty was called. "What are you doing? Come warm up." Fraser was fussing with the scarves, hats, and coats on the hall stand in the entryway. They'd been designated a small house about a quarter mile from the RCMP station, right in the heart of their little mountain town. Ray thought Lupine Pass was a nice little place: remote enough for Fraser—and a damn sight closer to Inuvik than Vancouver—but still big enough, what with the highway passing through down slope, to get decent groceries and cable TV.

"But fighting fires?" Fraser settled back down on the couch next to Ray and reached forward to sip from his now-tepid cup of tea. "Why not helping at the community center? You have experience with that, after all."

The game had cut to commentators, and Ray sighed inwardly. Nobody could say Fraser wasn't tenacious; he'd worry this thing like Dief with a bone. Ray said, "You know the last thing Marlene wants is an ex-Chicago cop teaching a bunch of thirteen-year-old Dene kids to fight." Ray thumbed the remote and scrolled through the channels, looking for something better than the game, something better than the argument he and Fraser weren't having.

"Well, true. But I didn't mean boxing, precisely."

Ray wasn't sure he wanted to hear where this was going. They'd both had a long day—Fraser at work and Ray helping the town holiday committee decorate Main Street with lights and garland…even though it was hardly even November.

Another sip of tea later, Fraser said, "I'm sure you could help at their dance classes."

Ray snorted. "Yeah, I don't think there's a swing category at their traditional dance thingamadoohickey."

"I believe you dance quite well. I doubt it would be difficult for someone with an inborn talent to, um, pick up, as it were."

Ray didn't roll his eyes, but he sat up, stretched his shoulders, and turned off the television. He didn't want this to escalate, because then Fraser would sulk and half the folks in town would give Ray the stink-eye—like it was his fault that he had his own life, too. Finally, he turned his head to look at Fraser, who was staring uneasily into his heavy ceramic teacup.

Oh, hell. "Look," Ray said, trying for easy, "Charlie asked, I said yes, and I want to do this. It's as simple as that."

"I understand that, but—

"Nobody wants some campfire gone wrong to burn down the whole Yukon, right? They need help. And hey," Ray said, barely pausing, "you have to go check out the scenes too, so maybe you could try seeing this as a chance for us to work together again, you know? As a duet, like we were."

"Are," Fraser said emphatically.

Ray ducked his head, because sure, at home—no problem. But there were only so many tune-ups he could give a snowmobile; only so much time he could spend at Wilson's Outfitter's, even though Red had a close-target range in an old barn down the valley; only so long he could sit and jaw at Tom's Café over coffee. Having nothing productive to do all day was driving him nuts and Fraser damned well knew it.

"Are," Fraser repeated softly, and slid his fingers into Ray's hand, warm skin caressing his palm until finding a grip and holding fast. "Going into a fire is—Ray, if anything were to happen to you—"

Ray made a face, but after a moment he gripped Fraser's hand hard. "Right back atcha," he said softly.

Fraser took a deep breath, his whole face brimming with argument waiting to happen. Ray lifted an eyebrow and tilted his head, daring him right back to say it wasn't the same thing. Fraser held his gaze for a long moment, and then drooped. "I know," he said. "I know, and I'm sorry. I don't mean to be overprotective of you—"

Ray made a face. "Is this not my third year in freezerland? Didn't I say I'd learn to hack it?"

That brought a fleeting smile to Fraser's eyes as he rubbed his thumb over Ray's ring finger. There wasn't a ring there, but Ray knew what Fraser meant by it. "You have, and admirably; it's simply that there's so much here you have yet to encounter. You can't blame me for having some reservations, can you?"

"Hey." Ray sat up straighter, shifting his whole body; he was halfway on the verge of getting up and pacing around the room, but he didn't want to let go of Fraser's hand. "I got the skills they need, okay? And I'm not going to be at any more risk of getting killed or maimed out there than you are." Ray nudged Fraser's knee with his own. "Am I right?"

Fraser focused on their knees. "Of course you're right. That was the trouble to begin with."

Ray smirked and moved his hand to Fraser's denim-clad thigh. Layers of cotton covered firm muscle. "Love you," Ray said. He squeezed once, twice, harder. Then Fraser laid his head on Ray's shoulder, and Ray relaxed a little inside.

After a moment the touch became a lingering nuzzle. Fraser pressed his face into the warmth of Ray's neck, doing that thing that was half-snuffle, half-nibble and always sent a zing of pleasure to Ray's crotch. Ray shifted, need grabbing him where it counted, and their lips met as they went down, Ray on his back and Fraser covering him like a human version of the thick woolen blanket draped over the back of their couch.

Ray hooked his ankles around Fraser's calves, relishing the full-body contact. Fraser moaned and Ray kissed him deeper. After a while, he said, "So, you're okay with it, then?"

Fraser didn't answer immediately, and he still looked half-stifled up inside, so Ray let it go—again—in favor of more making out. He threaded his fingers through Fraser's hair and nipped at Fraser's mouth, laying soft kisses and sucking gently at Fraser's lips, teasing Fraser's tongue while his legs cradled Fraser's between them.

The frown was fading, but there was still a jumble of worry tightening the lines of Fraser's face. "I have no right to prevent you, of course."

" 'Course not," Ray murmured, "now stop missing the point," and kissed Fraser again, long and sweet, hoping hard that Fraser would get it and they'd be on the same page again. A while later, with one hand covering the back pocket of Fraser's jeans and the other in his hair, Ray said, "There's nowhere for me to be a cop out here, but this is close. It's helping people out and maybe catching some bad guys, like I'm good at."

Fraser lifted up onto his knees and elbows. "Ray, surely you know that isn't what gives me pause."

Ray caught Fraser's arms before he could pull too far away. "Hey, it's okay," he said, and wrapped his legs more firmly around Fraser's. "So, this is your crappy record with people burning down your stuff talking?"

Fraser shrugged. "My apartment building, my father's cabin, the Vecchio house, Ray Vecchio's car…"

"Mmm, first time you touched my thigh," Ray said, and couldn't help the wink because Fraser was trying to glower, only it looked more like a pout. "Nobody's going to burn me down," Ray said seriously.

"I believe we've had the conversation about high-risk professions." Fraser's voice was cool, the way he got when he was hiding behind that damned logic.

Ray stared up at him a moment before answering, "Yeah, we have, Mister-why-no-I-haven't-considered-retirement-Ray-why-do-you-ask."

Fraser looked down at Ray's chest. Ray saw a jumble of conflicting emotions pass over his face. "Sorry," Fraser said finally, and Ray wrapped his arms around him and pulled him back down. The kiss was contrite, too, until it turned fierce and needful. Then Fraser slipped from Ray's arms and slid down his body. Fraser didn't say anything else; but a moment later, Ray's dick was engulfed in wet heat, which Ray knew was Fraser-shorthand for, _I love you-don't scare me-don't you dare get yourself killed._ And because he was fluent in that language too, Ray stroked as much of Fraser as he could reach and let his body answer in kind.  


*  


December  


Fraser sat at his desk in his office in the Lupine Pass RCMP Station and wished he were on patrol. Sadly, being the officer in charge of the detachment meant a severe reduction of his monthly quota of fieldwork. Today, Fraser was looking at a tall stack of paperwork to process for the territorial prosecutor's office, and he bemoaned more than ever his constables' particular understanding of how to fill out police reports. Happily, the two he presently had on staff would be rotated elsewhere soon, and he could train his new officers in proper execution of Form C-99B/3 from their very first day.

Ice encrusted Fraser's single small window, making a dim watercolor of the mural painted on the side of the Hudson's Bay Company store next door. Lupine Pass was a newish town, an upstart village in the heart of the Pelly Mountains consisting mainly of Dene and Métis people. It was one hamlet Fraser had never visited in his nomadic youth, being too far south, too far up in the mountains, and only marginally on the river; but there was "the Bay", as everyone called the store, providing clothes and groceries to rural Canadians all over the North and the West, and its familiarity was a touchstone.

Fraser shook himself. He was woolgathering, and if he was so distracted, then he might as well take a break for lunch. He donned his coat and instructed Constable Jones to remain there until he returned. Then he went through the side door into the fire station to find Ray.

Ray wasn't there, though. The fire engine was gone and the station was almost empty. Jim was sitting in the office eating a sandwich. He waved at Fraser and swallowed. "Hi there, Corporal. You looking for Ray?"

Fraser smiled. "As a matter of fact, yes."

"Charlie took everybody out for driving lessons on the engine."

"Oh," said Fraser, trying to mask his disappointment. "I suppose that explains why I didn't hear the siren."

"Yeah, Charlie didn't want a bunch of rubberneckers watching the new recruits learn to handle his baby," Jim said with a grin.

"Ah," said Fraser, "well, I'll look for Ray later, then."

"If it's important, they've got radio—oh—" Jim broke off, looking embarrassed. "Sorry. You already know how to reach him, obviously."

"It isn't urgent," Fraser said, trying to be friendly and reassuring. Ray had had his new firefighter friends over to the house a few times, and Fraser was on good terms with all of them. Not close terms, but he felt a sense of camaraderie with them as public servants, and also with their spouses: none of them were strangers to worry. But Fraser felt restless in the way that only brisk exercise could relieve, and so he took his leave of Jim and went out onto Main Street.

The historic places in the Yukon and Northwest Territories were, of course, all located on rivers first and highways later, if they were lucky; but Lupine Pass was a more recent addition to the province. The town had been constructed between the mines and the highway, while the river and highway met almost a kilometer south of Main Street. The region was dotted with the rotting log and fieldstone ruins of failed mining or logging towns, as was Canada as a whole, for that matter. Failed homesteads, failed oil towns, failed outposts in the bush where Hudson's Bay Company men used to stock a lonely general provisions store back in fur trading days. There were ghost towns all over; that the community was holding together was a small miracle, Fraser reflected.

Holiday decorations were strung from every streetlight and storefront. He walked along the path in the snow at the edge of the street; there weren't sidewalks, of course, as everything was covered in snow for more than half the year. Henderson's Liquor Store had a handful of skidoos parked in front of it. Further down, the bank was almost deserted. The café across the street from it seemed to be half-full, and the fragrance of baking bread drifted over, as sure a lure to Fraser's appetite as anything, when a couple exited.

"A bowl of stew and chunk of fresh sourdough would do nicely, thank you," Fraser said to Laynie Tom when she asked for his order. She had her black hair pulled back and was practically running from booth to table to counter to kitchen, taking orders and delivering plates. She spoke to diners in both English and Northern Tutchone, which bore no similarity to the Inuvialuktun spoken in the Northwest Territories and which Fraser as yet only partially understood.

A glass of milk arrived in a whirlwind and his food not long after. Sitting at the counter, Fraser could listen to the conversations of the people around him without seeming to spy. There were several tables of tourists, or possibly soi-disant 'extreme' athletes, Fraser couldn't quite tell. The other customers were locals on their lunch breaks.

In winter, Lupine Pass turned into a gingerbread village rivaling Wells, British Columbia for what Ray so aptly termed 'lethal doses of cute'. Wells was bigger, a happy picture postcard of a tamed frozen wonderland, and easier to get to. Lupine Pass was less twee, had less money to put into disguising its above ground sewer system, and in all truth, held more of the wilderness in it.

Lupine Pass was a snapshot of the forces of civilization in close combat with the ancient and dark creature that comprised the far Northwest: mountains, forest, and tundra; rock and ice. Town leaders had a number of ideas for bringing in industry beyond the nickel and coal mines off the highway. So far there were three truck stops and a string of fast food restaurants catering to miners and the local teenagers, to say nothing of the hamlet's sad motel and single posh bed and breakfast.

After six months here, Fraser was reasonably fond of the post. Not as much as Tuktoyuktuk, but the RCMP viewed it as difficult in the extreme to enforce the law among a community of friends, which was why he had been unsurprised to receive a notice of reassignment after he and Ray completed their second full year in Tuk.

He had, in fact, made few friends thus far in Lupine Pass. The memory of RCMP abuses of aboriginal people was still fresh here, and while people were polite, they didn't hide their—valid and understandable, if frustrating—mistrust of Fraser's office. Meanwhile, in joining the volunteer fire department, Ray had made quite a home for himself, which to Fraser was a relief given Ray's initial difficulty in adapting to life as a Mountie's fulltime, non-professional partner—begrudging the absence of small-town police forces he might join. But people in Lupine Pass seemed to like him, and Charlie Montaigne seemed to see in Ray a long lost younger brother, something that Ray responded to like a flower to the sun.

Or a moth to a flame, Fraser thought, sopping up stew with his bread.

But no. Not that. Fraser had resolved to train himself away from the use of fire references. No burning of any kind, no "up in smoke", and absolutely no searing pain, like that presently boring a hole in the middle of his back. Fraser knew perfectly well that Ray was fully trained and capable as a firefighter. He would have faith in Ray's abilities, full stop.

Beyond that, Fraser's spine was all right when he didn't torque it too briskly. It would keep, he was certain, at least until he was sure the post's new men were trained to his exacting standards.  


*  


Harley used to smile more, and Teague wasn't sure when she'd stopped. He passed the open bedroom doorway on the way to the washroom, and then again, going to the kitchen for sodas. She was lying on her bed with her head toward the foot, a textbook and notebook spread out in front of her. They had two final exams left, and then they were done. He balanced a can at her elbow, and then fell back onto the room's other twin bed: his old bed, before their mother had booted him out of 'Harley's' room to sleep on the living room sofa.

"It's a matter of propriety," she'd said, and her tone echoed that of the rabid church ladies who tried to make kids promise not to have sex until marriage.

Harley and Teague had stared at her in disbelief until they figured out she was serious—drunk off her ass, but serious.

"You think we're that desperate?" Harley snarled at Trisha as Teague said, "Mom! That's my sister you're talking about!"

Trisha had launched into a winding monologue, saying it was only a matter of time before they started fucking and it was only a matter of time before they turned into stupid drunk teenagers with nothing but hormones and bush parties between them, and she wouldn't have them getting up to any nastiness under her roof.

That had been when they were fourteen. They'd walked out in rage, but they knew they weren't going to win the fight.

Later that day, as Teague was trying to figure out how much of his stuff he should bother moving to the living room, Harley had hissed, "She could have bothered with this when we were little if she really cared about me seeing you naked."

It was true. They'd spent nine months in a womb together, were born two minutes apart, and had always been best friends. "She's drunk, don't worry about it," Teague whispered back. It was also true that Teague and Harley had never had any kind of modesty around each other. It was no big deal because they were _family_. Maybe it wasn't the way rich people lived, but it was good enough for them so far and their mother's worry over it was so belated as to be laughable.

But now it was finals, nearly a year later. Harley was studying; her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, a thick line of black eyeliner rimmed her deep brown eyes, and she was kicking the thin yellow wall above her pillow with socked feet. Teague was sprawled on his pillows cramming for his English final, which meant reading the Dickens novel he was supposed to have finished weeks before. Teague had finally shot up in height and didn't look quite so much like Harley. Some assholes still called him Teagan sometimes, but not as much as they used to. They didn't call him Harley-Davidson anymore, either. He'd broken his hand for that one, but it had been worth it.

Every once in a while he looked up from _David Copperfield_ to stare off into space or watch Harley twirl her pen. At some point the door slammed: Trisha leaving for work. She was a desk clerk at the Lupine Pass Motel. It was a crummy job at a crummy place, but the bed and breakfast up the hill wouldn't hire her—she claimed it was because she was Indian, but Teague thought it was probably because everyone in town knew she was an alcoholic.

In school they'd learned about aboriginal people not having the genes to process alcohol like people from Europe and other parts of the world, which was why alcoholism was such a problem on the reserves and among the First Nations at large. They'd had this lesson year after year, but it was grade seven before they understood she was the kind of drunk people laughed at in disgust. Their whole lives, their mom had just been their _mom_. It was just how she was. Except by the time they were twelve, they could sit there and watch her get drunk and see the changes. See her go from grouchy but rational to stupid and embarrassing. That day in grade seven, once they were alone to talk, Teague had told Harley, "Don't you ever let me become an alcoholic." "Me, too," she'd said, and done the fancy fist-bump and handshake they were doing that year to seal it.

Teague didn't have to admit he was afraid of it. Neither did Harley.

"You want something to eat?" he asked when he couldn't take any more Dickens.

"Yeah," she said, scowling at her biology book. "There should be stuff in the freezer. Or else pasta."

"You're washing up," he called over his shoulder.

"Not if I can't get these stupid phylums straight," she said. He was already in the kitchen, but he could still hear her because their house was, one, a piece of shit, and two, really damned small. It was only half a house, at that, an old shack that some enterprising doofus had nailed pink insulation and rust-colored aluminum siding onto, and then split in half and gave two doors. The other side was an old beauty salon that had gone out of business ages ago; in the summertime they could smell the stink from spilled permanent and hair coloring chemicals seeping through the walls.

Teague's stomach growled. At least Harley had grabbed some groceries this week. These days Trisha mostly just ate at the bar next to the motel.  


*  


January  


Ray Kowalski was peering out the porch window, steaming mug of coffee in hand. He was waiting for the sun to rise. It was 12:30pm.

Twilight was slow, but gradually the hundreds of billions of stars faded to a few dozen bright pricks of light on a field of deep blue-green, and then those winked out one by one as the morning turned purple and orange and a weird shade of yellow. The dim orange disk of the sun itself seemed very, very far away.

They'd been up for hours—since normal waking time, since Fraser was convinced that strict adherence to schedule would somehow make up for the sun not being there. Ray watched the digital thermometer climb a few fractions of a degree when the sun hit its sensor. It was thirty below out there. Celsius. Ray flipped the switch to read it in Fahrenheit, and then flipped it back. It was crazy cold. And so dry out, you steamed like a hot drink—the air sucked the moisture right out of your skin—so he and Fraser had started greasing each other up after every shower. Which amounted to sex after every shower. Which did not suck and he was not complaining.

But still. Cold.

They were both home today. Fraser had been fourteen days on and was due five off. Ray was on call, but only for emergencies in the Pass or a three-alarm or better down-slope. Even then, the bright boys down in Pelly Crossing were due to take some long hauls.

Not that water would flow in this weather, but he tried not to think about that.

The sun was up. Dief, Roxie, Bucko, and Flit bounded out of the kennel as Fraser slid open the door. They were like four furry dervishes in the snow, twisting and snapping at each other's muzzles. They hadn't had any good playtime in days.

Ray watched Dief race Flit to the woodshed. Then his attention was caught by the big round thermometer nailed to the shed's corner post. Maybe it was colder over there? Or maybe not.

The outer door swung open and shut. Ray heard the sound of Fraser's discarded boots hitting the floor. He also heard the absurd sounds Fraser made when he thought no one was listening: a rolling _brrrrrr_ noise and several sentences Ray couldn't make out. Ray smiled down into his coffee, and then swallowed what remained of it.

"Thermometer broke," Ray said when Fraser came in from the anteroom.

"Oh?" Fraser was out of his boots, parka, and hat. He stood at Ray's elbow unwinding his scarf. Ray pointed at the woodshed. "Ah. I suppose it was at least thirty-nine below this morning." Ray lifted an eyebrow. "Freezing point of mercury. It'll melt in the spring."

"Ah," Ray said, lifting his face for a kiss. Fraser nudged him over to share the window seat. His mouth was freezing. "What, were you eating snow out there or something? Don't you tell me never to do that?"

Fraser's mouth quirked. "There's no harm in eating an occasional icicle. Besides, I'd rather planned something else for when I came in."

"Oh yeah? What would that be?"

"Well, you've ruined the surprise now," Fraser said, the corner of his mouth curling in a smile.

Ray snorted and decided to humor him. "Surprise. Okay, fine. Here I am, watching the snow. Can't hear you taking your boots off over there or nothing." Fraser stood up. Ray looked at the sky. They might get a couple of full hours of light today. "Jeez!" he shouted as he felt Fraser's cold, wet mouth on the back of his neck.

"Surprise, Ray," murmured Fraser as Ray spun around.

Ray narrowed his eyes, tilted his head. "This means war," he said conversationally, his grin breaking out on the last word. Fraser bolted to their bedroom and Ray followed close on his heels, tackling him to the bed.

They wrestled, laughing like kids, as Ray tugged and pulled at Fraser's layers, searching for skin. Fraser had the advantage, since Ray was wearing fewer clothes to start with, and reached his ribs first. Ray shrieked. "Your hands are freezing!" he yelled. But then Fraser's face was pressed against Ray's stomach and his wrist was lined up with Ray's thickening erection, rubbing hard. Fraser kissed up Ray's chest to a nipple, sucked lightly, and then looked up. His eyes were shining.

"You okay?" Ray asked.

Fraser nodded. "I feel positively decadent."

"You look good in decadent." Ray held Fraser's gaze for a moment, smiling, connecting, and feeling Fraser's goofy joy at—having the day off? having sex in the daytime?—Ray wasn't sure. He leaned up and kissed Fraser solidly on the mouth. "Get the covers," he said, and started stripping out of his clothes.

A half-roll and two pivots later, Fraser had the covers pulled back, around, and over them so they were enfolded in their bed of flannel, down, and fur. Ray skinned out of his jeans and long johns immediately. Fraser's sweater flew out from under the duvet and landed on the dresser, knocking over a bottle of something. "Oops," Fraser said. Ray laughed. They were ridiculous. He was freezing. His teeth were chattering, but it was mostly the cold sheets. And that the wood stove in the center of the main room didn't do much for a naked guy all the way over here.

Then Fraser was on him, covering him and pressing the heat of his body into Ray. "Oh yeah, like that," Ray said as Fraser's cock slid right over his sweet spot. Fraser did it again, groaning as he hit a good spot for himself. Ray wrapped his hand around their cocks. "You want we should make it last, take the whole day to play?" He lifted his hips a little and squeezed with his hand.

"Oh, Ray," Fraser whimpered into his mouth. The kiss kept going and going, but then Fraser turned his face, kissed Ray's cheek, jaw, the edge of his ear. "I'll have to see to the dogs before dark."

Ray cursed inwardly, and then made a guess at the time remaining. Good enough. "Come here," he said. He was warm now. He hooked his ankle around Fraser's feet and rolled them. Fraser let out a startled laugh, and Ray began nipping his way down Fraser's body.  


*  


Fraser came with his fingers tangled in Ray's hair and his eyes squinched shut. The covers had fallen back to drape around Ray's shoulders like a cape, leaving Fraser's chest flushed with desire and covered in goosebumps. Ray laid a final kiss on the head of Fraser's cock and crawled back up into Fraser's arms.

"You are wonderful," Fraser slurred, sex-drunk and glowing. Then Fraser's tongue was in Ray's mouth and Ray was arching against him, cock grinding, hands scrabbling for a hold on Fraser's smooth skin. With a whirl of motion, he was on his back. Above him, Fraser was rearranging the bedding, scooting down, already laying kisses in a wet line down from Ray's navel. Ray could feel Fraser's breath on the head of his cock. He couldn't help straining toward it, but Fraser laughed low in his throat and went lower, pressing soft dry kisses against Ray's balls, testing the soft skin of his sac between his lips, using his mouth to nudge his balls again. Playing.

"Fraser," Ray begged, pleasure-drunk and needing more.

"Ah, sorry. Just another moment," Fraser said, and Ray could see the mischief in his eyes.

Ray flung an arm over his face and felt a wet fingertip push into him. "Oh, god yes!" he yelled, and when Fraser's mouth engulfed his cockhead, that was it, Ray was gone, lost between the two points of pleasure—up-down, in-out—tearing him apart.  


*  


He woke up to the sound of a door shutting. He couldn't see the clock from the cozy nest of his blankets, but through the icy window, the sky looked purple. Then Fraser was there, dressed for outdoors except for boots and parka. He crawled up the bed, atop the covers, pinning Ray in place.

Fraser kissed him hello. "Good nap?"

Ray grinned. "The best kind." He kissed Fraser back. "Join me? We could go for round two."

A moment later, Fraser's layers were in a pile on the rug.

"Decadent," Ray said, and then he yelped, lurching half-off the bed. "Oh my god, your nose is frozen!" he shouted. Fraser giggled. "War! Did I not tell you this means war?" Ray said, laughing as Fraser rolled him over.

"Decadence," Fraser agreed, and as Fraser continued trying to put his cold parts in Ray's warm places, dogs howled happily in the kennel, a late lunch simmered on the stove, and a displaced pillow tumbled unnoticed to the floor.  


*  


Ray looked at the logbook for the last few months, confirming what he already knew in his head. Fires set only in empty or uninhabited buildings, usually at night. Random empty wilderness areas in or around town. Random dates. Random people's property. More were white than First Nations or Métis, but more white people had land, per capita, so maybe not a factor.

That left common factors: zilch.

But whoever was doing it hadn't hit any inhabited homes or bars or restaurants. Or the Fire Department and RCMP station. Or the town Nursing Station, which was good, because the whole area would be in a lot of hurt if that happened. Nah, this guy was targeting decrepit buildings, mostly. Like maybe he thought he was cleaning up the place.

Which was why it stuck out so much. Most Yukon fires were accidents. People's heaters got too hot and set the wall or floor on fire. Or someone left something on the floor too close and it smoldered until it caught, like a pillow knocked off the couch or a kid's toy left on the floor when everybody went to bed. Once it was a guy's boots: the sealing oil caught, the boots wicked the heat down to the floor, and the whole house came down. The family lost everything.

The job was good, but it wasn't like putting bad guys away had been for all those years in the Windy City. These were people Ray knew here in town. People Fraser couldn't get too close to, since Fraser was the cop here and no amount of hearty goodwill was going to fix the decades of damage done before the First Nations won their demand for human rights. But Ray, Ray got to shuffle through the ashes of their lives and rush through falling timbers to pull screaming three-year-olds out of their beds when the walls were on fire.

He did good work. As good as he had in Chicago. Just different. Emotionally speaking. And thankfully, most of the time it wasn't that exciting. Most of the time it was just putting on his big yellow suit and holding a hose at someone's house for an hour, or until the water ran out. And more often than that, it was just the fact of being on call. The fire department here had one guy on salary. One guy getting paid to keep things organized and make sure the volunteer crew knew how to do all the things they had to do. Everybody else just lived on call.

Just like Fraser did, too. And Ray kind of dug that. Having it in common again.

But Ray was stuck on the pattern of the arson. There was something there, but he couldn't tease it out. Friday was payday. There were never fires on Friday or Saturday before midnight. The miners kept an airtight schedule. The river boats didn't follow a work week, what with the season being so short. Wildcatters were too far away; oil rigs were down in the flats, not up in the mountains. Tourists were…too freaking unpredictable, but also unlikely to burn down the sights they were here to see.

Ray shook his head, shook out his shoulders, and shoved back from the big table in the station. He was making himself crazy.

Grabbing his phone and jacket, he went through the door into the RCMP station and looked for Fraser. He was on the phone, so Ray told Coleman, "Tell him I'm at the rink? Or maybe in the gym. I'll have my cell phone."

"Yes, sir," Coleman said, despite Ray telling him not to call him 'sir' about ten times a week.

Ray waved goodbye at Fraser and went up the street to the community center. He was bouncing on his heels. He caught himself shadowboxing on the corner. The air was cool again, like fall couldn't happen soon enough up here. It felt good in his lungs, clean. Yeah, he'd kill the heavybag first, and then skate for a while to cool off.  


*  


Teague was throwing rocks at the side of an old miner's shack in the winter twilight. It had never had any glass windows, so there wasn't any satisfying crash when stones hit the ruined building: only the dull sounds of rocks thwacking against frozen, slow-rotting wood. He was pissed—Harley didn't even know what about this time, although she thought it probably had to do with the assholes at school. Whitehorse was going to be a godsend, once they finally got there and could start grade ten. Once they could finally get out of this place. Anyway, it was better he was throwing shit at the building than yelling at her.

While Teague bled out his anger, Harley walked around the edge of the yard: the woods had been cut back some thirty years ago but never reestablished themselves in the shallow, stone-riddled dirt. It was a good place. Remote. The old snow was thin on the rocks, and there were too many stumps and rocky protrusions on the ground for snowmobiles to get close. The place practically cried out to be torched.

"What do you think?" Teague asked when she reappeared from around the corner of the moldering cabin.

"I like it."

"Want we should light it now, then?"

She sniffed at the frigid piney air, contemplating. There was snow coming. That was okay. The fire would eat the old wood in minutes.

Teague came over and stood behind her. He was taller by about four inches now, and he easily reached up and snapped a weathered wood shingle off the roof. "This can start it."

"You can do this one," she said magnanimously, and anyway, it was his turn. And it left her free to watch. She loved to make fire but the business of building it could be messy if you weren't careful. She was always careful, or at least as careful as Teague was, so they traded off. That way sometimes she got to burn and sometimes she got to revel.

Teague flipped open the small red and white flask of camp fuel he'd brought. He wet the edge of the shingle, and then sprayed his Anarchy symbol on the rotting porch. Harley snorted. "God, you are such a dork." With a grin, he struck a match and let it fly.  


*  


Charlie pointed his truck at the tiny airport's hangar building and rolled to a stop. Ray pulled on his furry fleece hat and hurried after him to the door.

Nolan McKenzie was seated on his wooden stool reading a well-thumbed copy of PC World. On the low counter in front of him sat three stacks of paper, a clipboard, a dozen bits of metal that Ray thought were probably airplane parts, and a thermos of coffee. Ray couldn't help sniffing.

Charlie signed some papers, and then they were rolling two mid-sized crates stamped with the official seal of the Yukon Territory over to the bed of Charlie's truck and wrestling them in. One new hose. One new caution yellow suit, with boots and helmet in Ray's size. One new oxygen tank. And a three-inch-thick binder on protocol and procedure and changes to same effective immediately, which they'd already received via email, but the law said they had to send a hardcopy, too, so here it was. Regardless, the Lupine Pass Volunteer Fire Department had been waiting months for some new equipment, and Ray could attest to how much it sucked to go into a fire in someone else's singed castoffs.

They said goodbye to Nolan and headed back to the abandoned RCMP garage they called a fire station. "So is Jim going to be around to help unload?" Ray asked, as they passed through town. Tom's Yukon Café went by. Henderson's Liquor, too. Ray was in better shape now than he'd ever been in his life, lugging all this equipment at altitude, but hell. None of them could afford to screw up their backs.

Charlie drummed his fingers on the edge of the steering wheel. "Aw, crap. He said he was going along with Tammy for her prenatal today."

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Ray said. "Never mind. We can get Fraser or one of the kids."

"You mean constables?" Charlie said, laughing.

Ray shrugged, grinning back. "Yeah, that's what I said."  


*  


March  


Smoke billowed, trapped inside the store and gusting around on the wind blowing in the front door and plate glass display window they'd had to break through to get inside. Ray had taken a crowbar to it; nothing as dramatic as when he'd ridden a motorcycle through that warehouse window to get to Fraser and Quinn, but this was maybe just as dangerous. Not the bullet in the head kind of dangerous but the backdraft in the face kind. He did it right, though: fast. Get the hoses in and spray the flames back before they could get bad. Drench everything.

Now the fire was out, finally, and Ray was stepping carefully through the puddles of char. He'd ditched the face mask and air tank, and his heavy yellow coat hung open, exposing his t-shirt and the suspenders holding his yellow fireproof pants up. The store had more smoke damage than char, and the metal frame didn't get hot enough to bring the roof down on them, but the place stank of burnt insulation and melted synthetics.

And, well, he didn't know if they had a copycat arsonist or what. Usually they got called for heaters over-warming a pair of waterproofed boots or kids' toys or something and burning people's houses down. Sometimes people were dumb and let coals jump out of their woodstoves. And sometimes it was ordinary kitchen fires with grease sailing out of the pan and catching everything it touched, people included.

Regular sorts of businesses didn't burn down in the middle of the night. Especially not places like Wilson's Outfitters.

It was past four then, and the sun was just creeping up over the horizon now with the beginnings of a new day; Ray was feeling it. He'd got the call a little after midnight, wrenching him out of some great post-orgasmic sleep. Fraser had shaken him awake, and there he was.

And there Fraser was, too. "Morning, Ray." Fraser pressed a steaming cup of coffee into Ray's hand.

"You are a god among men, Fraser." Ray blew into the hole in the lid and took a tentative sip. Not too hot, so he took a long drink. When he came up for air, Fraser was smiling slightly, watching openly. Ray grinned an "I love you" grin at him and said, "Right, so the mayor's trying to get an arson investigator to come up." Fraser nodded and Ray noticed finally that Fraser was in his blue uniform. "I guess you're not just here to bring me coffee, huh?"

"No, Ray, unfortunately."

"All right, come on," Ray said, drawing Fraser around the side of the smoldering building to the rear. "Red's hopping mad, by the way. Charlie's feeding him coffee and donuts down at the café if you want to talk to him."

"Ah, thanks for the tip." Fraser looked through the open service door to the destruction inside. "I take it Mr. Wilson was insured?"

"Yeah, that's the first thing everybody's asked him." Ray stepped inside and pointed at the wall to their left. "So, the perp broke in here—crowbar to the deadbolt—walked to the front, and poured gasoline from way up there in the front of the store all the way back here, and then he stopped there and doused the manager's office. Then he lit it and took off."

"Evidence?" Fraser asked faintly.

"No gas can, no matches, no lighter, nada. Took it all with."

The metal roof lay warped on its crossbeams. The ceiling tiles were mostly consumed. Fraser took in the sight and made a face like he'd swallowed bile.

"You okay?" Ray asked, worried.

"Fine." Fraser wrinkled his nose. "It's just the smell."

"Yeah, I get that." Ray caught himself tapping the toe of his black and yellow boot in a char puddle and stopped. "Can you tell something about it? Like the Garbo chick's perfume?"

Fraser shut his eyes and sniffed tentatively at the air. "No, Ray. It's only gasoline and the aroma of the various burned camping products, as you said. Other than the stench of burnt polymers, there's nothing distinctive about it at all."

Ray looked at Fraser, and the half-nauseated face he was making, again, and then he remembered. Fraser's apartment building, Fraser's cabin. Ray didn't mind the smell so much. It wasn't clean like a campfire, but it was still just char. Burnt stuff. It didn't resonate with loss and devastation; for him it meant a chance to help save something or someone. Of course, he'd never yet lost a victim he was trying to save. He was lucky like that and he knew it. Most volunteer guys, they quit when that happened. When they found someone nearly dead of smoke inhalation and couldn't bring them back—that could mess a guy up for life.

Ray was a lot more worried about that than he was about blazing timbers falling on him.

Turning back toward light and fresh air, Ray said, "You getting anything else from this? Besides an upset stomach?"

"No." Fraser shook himself and said, "Perhaps Dief will have better luck."

Ray sighed, staring up and down the street and at the smattering of gawkers sticking around. The person burning down the shacks out in the countryside was escalating, if this was him, but Ray couldn't tell if it was connected. It could've been a pissed off ex-employee. Maybe Red or his wife had an estranged ex. Maybe a crazy backpacker had been hiking through the Range in the night, got a hole in his tent, and decided to torch Red's. Ray didn't even have a hunch—not yet. And he couldn't poke around too hard for leads because he didn't have a badge or a warrant in his pocket. That was all up to Charlie, Fraser, and the two baby constables.  


*  


July  


Fraser lay face down on the Lupine Pass Nursing Station's x-ray table. "Breathe in," Nicole, the radiology tech told him, "and hold it." The machine clanked on, rumbled for a few seconds, and ground to a stop. Fraser watched from the table while Nicole scanned the film into the electronic database. A moment later, she reappeared from behind her shielded alcove with a new blank film in her hands. "I need for you to lay on your left side, now, Corporal. Can you manage that?"

"Of course," he said, as she slid the unexposed cartridge into its slot in the table. Then she repositioned his angle and bustled back to the x-ray controls.

"And breathe," she ordered.

It was only two today. In a couple of weeks there would be an MRI and a CT scan in Whitehorse. Maybe cortisone injections for the pain. Perhaps emergency surgery if they discovered something dire in the images. But another attempt to remove the bullet was a certainty. The question was how long he could delay the inevitable.

Fraser dressed slowly. He'd learned the hard way not to twist overmuch and always, always to bend slowly. However, he believed the advice to restrict his movement entirely was so much quackery, as his father would have said. Good muscle tone would hold everything in place until such a time that surgical intervention became necessary.

In his head, Fraser could hear Ray accuse, "And you know this from all those years you spent in med school?" Of course, he had read more than one neurology text in the years since he had been shot, but he had to grant the point: he was an expert in Canadian law enforcement and possibly international jurisdictional cooperation; he was not an expert in neurospinal surgery.

"Now, if there are any changes at all, you're to call the Station immediately, day or night, and tell the nurse on duty," Nicole told him. "Don't hesitate, Corporal. I can't stress the risks highly enough."

"Yes, ma'am," he answered dutifully.

Ten minutes later, he was back behind his desk in the RCMP station. The matter of taking himself off the patrol rotation was simple but grim. The trouble would be how to break the news to Ray.  


*  


It was summer and it was hot: hot for Canada, hot like people without air conditioning didn't know how to cope with. The grass along the roads was beige-colored and tinder-dry, and everyone in the region lived with a low smoldering fear that a wildfire would come and wipe them all out. Because, even if the people made it out, if the forest went and their homes went, and the mines decided to cut their losses and run, there wouldn't be any reason for them to stay. Then Lupine Pass would be a ghost town. And if the town went, then Fraser's post would go, too.

Ray was learning this about Canada—never did any one thing happen to anybody but it had to slowly domino-effect its way from one end of the country and back again. Nobody wanted to fund rural emergency services overhauls, but everybody agreed it was necessary. Only, the talking heads on the CBC seemed to be saying that now, with the Yukon government making enough noise to be noticed, that surely all the other more populated parts of the country needed that overhaul money, too, and far sooner than those (weird) folks out in the back ass of nowhere.

Sometimes Ray did miss Chicago, if only for having more than three kinds of take-out. To say nothing of having a badge, and an awesome car, and real pavement, and established city services. But the tradeoff was Fraser. That made up for a lot.

Ray heard the dogs settle and the door shut. A couple of minutes passed, and then Fraser was behind the sofa, reaching down along the line of Ray's arm. He took Ray's mostly-empty glass of lemonade out of his hand and set it on the end table. Leaning closer, he took the television remote, flipped to a satellite music channel, and dropped the remote out of sight. The music was something low and rhythmic, nothing like the bubbly summer beach music most stations were playing. The fan above them whirred.

Ray looked up. Fraser was down to his wife-beater and suspenders, sweat glistening on his skin. "Everything okay?"

Fraser's fingers ran through Ray's shower-damp hair and dug into his shoulders. "Fine," he said into Ray's neck. He nosed at the short, prickly hairs at the nape of Ray's neck. Then he bit down and Ray's whole body arched.

"You smell like smoke under the soap," Fraser said.

"Nrrgh," Ray agreed. "Had a call to…someplace a couple of hours out. It didn't have a name. The shed burned down—propane tank exploded, maybe. Supposedly. They're lucky the house didn't catch, but the wind changed so it was okay."

"Hmm," said Fraser, licking and kissing his way from one of Ray's ears to the other. "You believe it was suspicious?"

Duh, Ray almost said, with somebody burning down buildings on top of the normal stupid fires, every fire was suspicious. But it was too hot to get snippy, especially with the guy making happy with his neck. Ray craned his head around to meet Fraser's mouth in a kiss. Then he twisted halfway around on the couch, so they weren't doing crazy contortions across the furniture. It helped; the kiss was scorching hot and salty and tasted slightly of smoke and fully of Fraser. As they parted, Ray shrugged with one shoulder. "There wasn't any reason for the thing to blow. It just seems weird."

Fraser nodded. "We should go check it out."

"Can't. I'm on call here."

"Tomorrow?"

Ray pulled Fraser down for another kiss, harder. "Yeah, tomorrow is good."

Fraser hummed against Ray's mouth, and then Ray felt lips sliding over his cheek and Fraser ducking his head. "Want you," Fraser said, and bent to graze Ray's neck with his teeth. Fraser was still shy of asking, and was always more likely to lead with a gentle grope and kiss than a flirtatious word or overt proposition.

"Want you in me or me in you?" Ray said, picking up the thread before Fraser could get all shy about using words. Fraser's hands were under Ray's arms, pulling him up to a knee, tugging his shirt up. "Or are you thinking of blowjobs instead?"

Fraser groaned low in his throat. "Perhaps to start with? You taste so good, Ray; I don't think I can resist."

"No need to."

Ray's shirt hit the floor, pants, underwear, socks, along with Fraser's, drawing a neat trail to the bedroom. Ray hit the bed hard, automatically scooting up with his heels. Fraser was on him instantly, sucking his cockhead in, laving the shaft, and swallowing it all the way down.

"God, Fraser!" Ray yelled. Then he remembered all the windows in the living room were open and anyone outside could hear all their noise. He thought for a split second about getting up to shut them. Then he shoved his forearm against his mouth instead.

"Your taste, Ray," Fraser said, pulling off. His lips were red and glistening with spit. Ray was so hard he was going to explode. Or die. Or explode. Fraser sat back on his heels, evaluating the spread of Ray's body like he would a crime scene, maybe. He had that look in his eye, and it was a little unnerving.

"Fraser," Ray said. He rose up on his elbows and made a 'get with it' face.

Fraser shook himself. "Sorry. It's only that you're luminous in the afternoon light. I wish I had the skill…I would love to paint you."

Ray hooked his feet around Fraser's thighs and hauled him forward, kissing him hard and thoroughly, because if Fraser was going to be a big romantic sap, then Ray was damn well going to treat him like one. Between kisses, Ray murmured, "I would love to fuck you. Or have you do me." He kissed Fraser's lower lip, and nipped at his chin for good measure. "Yeah, I think sometime in the next couple of minutes would be good. What do you think?"

Fraser's face was pink to the ears, but he was rubbing his hard-on against Ray's, and after a moment he was straddling Ray's legs and doing it again, and again, rubbing himself against Ray's cock from cleft to balls to the sweet spot on the head of his dick. They were sweat-slick and dripping, but Ray reached for the lube anyway. If he was going to last, he'd need it.

Fraser had his eyes shut, like all his attention was on rocking his perineum against Ray's cock. Ray slicked up two fingers and pushed behind Fraser's balls. "Lift up," he said. Fraser raised his hips slightly, shifting to rub his erection against Ray's. It was nothing like an easy angle, but Ray got his fingers in and Fraser pushed back on them, tightening and releasing, doing that thing that shook out the tension and resistance and let Ray drive into Fraser hard.

Ray looked up at Fraser's face, then—his naked face. "Something happened," Ray blurted, and his fingers inside Fraser scissored of their own volition. Fraser made a muffled cry, and Ray did it again.

"Need you," Fraser mouthed, barely putting any air in the words at all, as if there were no air left in him to talk about…whatever it was.

Ray wondered what it could be, what was up that would bring them here like this, but now wasn't the time. Now was the time to reach up with his left hand and gently cup Fraser's cheek. Fraser didn't open his eyes.

"Kiss me," Ray said, guiding Fraser's head down. This kiss was gentle and deep; Fraser moved so that Ray could get his fingers into him deeper, at a better angle for opening him up. A twist of his wrist and Fraser was moaning into his mouth.

"Now," Fraser said, "Ray, now." He knelt up, separating their bodies. Ray lubed up his cock and held it steady as Fraser sank down on it.

"Fuck," Ray breathed as the heat engulfed him. Fraser's erection flagged a little; Ray poured more lube on his hand and began stroking him. Fraser shuddered all over and rose up on Ray's cock, then descended. Slowly he built a rhythm, a grueling sort of rhythm as if Fraser were trying to take a hard pounding from Ray by riding him like this.

Ray opened his eyes to Fraser grimacing. "Hey," he said, soft but firm. "Fraser, look at me." Fraser held himself still, but didn't pull off of Ray. He looked wrecked. Ray frowned. "Do you need to be—he gestured vaguely, "—like that?" He patted Fraser's thighs. "Come on, lift up."

"It's all right, Ray," Fraser protested, but Ray shoved him over, sliding out of him.

Fraser winced, but it didn't look to Ray like a normal ass-wince; it looked like— "Okay, what was that?" he asked.

Fraser scowled at the foot of the bed. "My back, I'm afraid."

"Muscle, bone, did someone nail you with a branch again?" Ray was kneeling now, hands on Fraser's shoulders, pawing at his sides to get Fraser onto hands and knees, but it wasn't really working. "Well?" he said when Fraser didn't answer.

"The bullet wound," Fraser said quietly.

"And riding my cock like—Ray cut himself off before he said something like 'Dudley Do-Right' or 'a new pony' and found himself sleeping on the couch for a week. "—like that is going to be any good for it," he snapped. "Here, I'll get you an ice pack."

"Ray, it's fine." Fraser reached for his arm. His other hand was stroking his dick.

"It's not fine, you're hurting." Ray stopped. "Okay, wait. Tell me you're not getting off on being in pain—"

"I'm not. Just, after?" Fraser was pink to his ears again, and that made Ray feel a little better. "Let's finish? The endorphins produced during exertion such as sexual intercourse are perhaps the best pain relievers available—"

Ray snorted and got out of bed. "Don't move." Two minutes later he was back with one of the squishy blue cold packs that lived in their freezer. "Okay, endorphin-guy, here we go."

Fraser turned before Ray could see the eye-roll but Ray knew it was there. Squeezing Fraser's ass once for good measure, Ray lined up his cock and pushed in. After three good, long thrusts, Ray pressed the cold pack down on the bullet wound in the center of Fraser's spine. Fraser let out a shout that all the neighbors would've had to be deaf not to hear, but it was too late to worry about it. Ray kept fucking Fraser, one hand on his hip and the other on the cold pack. The skin around it was covered in goosebumps. Ray drove into Fraser faster, shallower, aiming for Fraser's prostate with every thrust. Switching hands on the pack, he reached around to touch icy fingers to Fraser's nipples, pinching and teasing each in turn.

"Ray," Fraser panted.

"Yeah," Ray said. The cold pack wouldn't stay in place on its own, but Ray wanted—needed—to hold Fraser. He wished he'd thought to grab a dish towel for the cold pack, but, no joy. He sucked in a breath and leaned forward, wrapping both arms tight around Fraser's body. "Love you," he said into Fraser's neck.

The cold was biting into the skin right above his stomach. It made Ray's nipples hard and his balls jerk up in reflex, but the heat of Fraser under him, surrounding him, more than matched it. Ray stroked down Fraser's torso and cupped his balls in a cool hand. Fraser's hands were fisted tight in the sheets. "Please, Ray," Fraser rasped.

Ray rolled Fraser's balls in his left hand for a moment before wrapping that arm around his waist. It wasn't a great hug, but it wasn't supposed to be: it was an anchor, a power cord, a lifeline, something. Ray could feel the pleasure building, getting more and more urgent. He took Fraser's cock in hand, squeezing just as he thrust deep, and bam! They were in tune again. The cold pack slipped from between them but it didn't matter. Fraser was breathing like he was close, and he was—he was so hard and wet in Ray's hand—and one, two, three thrusts more; Fraser turned his head and said, "Kiss me," and it was messy and sideways and full of the old zing, the zing that said whatever it was they'd get through it together; and Ray squeezed Fraser harder as they kissed—so good—and jerked him with each thrust, jerking the pleasure from Fraser's dick pull by pull, and—

"Yes!" said Ray, and "Ray!" grunted Fraser into their sheets, and together they came and came.

Later, lying together, Ray on his back and Fraser flat on his stomach where he'd collapsed, Ray said, "Okay, so are you ready to tell me what's going on, yet?"

Fraser stuck an arm under his pillow, raising his face enough to speak coherently.

Ray rolled to his side, facing him, waiting. He continued waiting, but wasn't going to do this for long. He shifted and said, "Do I need to go yell at anybody?"

Fraser snorted softly. "No, Ray, it isn't anything like that, I'm afraid." He sighed. "We had a call this morning that…well, suffice it to say that there was a foot chase through dense forest, and I took a somewhat nasty fall. Constable Coleman insisted on taking me to the Nursing Station, where the nurse-practitioner expressed some concern..." He stopped, swallowed, and started again. "That is, it seems there is reason for concern about deterioration of the spinal cartilage the bullet is nested in—"

Ray had sat up when he heard the word 'nurse'. When he heard bullet, his feet hit the floor. "And so you thought it would be a great idea to come home and do something to risk screwing your back up even further? Do you want to be paralyzed?" he yelled.

"Ray." Fraser's face was a blank, but Ray couldn't tell if it was with pain or denial or what. It was probably both, but with an extra dose of pain because Fraser was taking deep breaths, pushing up on his hands, and carefully sitting up.

"Did I hurt you?" Ray asked.

"No," Fraser said immediately.

But Ray could see differently. Fraser didn't show pain unless it was bad. Stubborn fucking Mountie. "Did the sex hurt you?" he demanded.

Fraser's voice rose. "No more than vigorous intercourse would be expected to, Ray."

"Fraser, that is not an answer!" Ray yelled.

"Well forgive me for not wanting to think back to one of the most regrettable periods in my life," Fraser snapped. "Or its long-term consequences."

Ray bit back his retort and folded his arms across his chest. Fraser was sitting up, but he looked like he was regretting it, too, along with all the hell he'd gone through for one hard-ass woman lost in the snow.

"They set you up with a specialist?" Ray asked at last. Gingerly, he sat on the edge of the bed next to Fraser. He spotted the blue cold pack peeking out from a fold of the sheet and pressed it flat against the scar in the middle of Fraser's back.

Fraser's eyes fell shut and a noise of relief escaped. "Yes, they're supposed to call tomorrow to set the appointment."

"I'm going with you," Ray said firmly.

Fraser leaned against him, not saying anything for a minute. Ray said it again, softer but just as firm. Fraser took Ray's hand, gave him a small, relieved smile, and said, "Thank you."  


*  


August  


Ray looked down into the valley from the shoulder of the road. The maples were covered in red leaves and a few hundred yards down from where he stood a stream had piles of early snow clinging to its banks. Behind him, a thin line of smoke drifted up from Old Man Jakes' place: the kennels had all burned to the ground.

The house, at least, was untouched, and Warren had sent the dogs off to his sister's back when his wife was dying. But there wasn't a reason in the world to torch the Jakes' empty kennel. Assuming it was empty, which they'd find out as soon as it cooled off enough to check.

It was the first suspicious fire in the months since the Ferrier place went up and half that hilltop came down in ash and bulldozed boulders and trees. Ray couldn't imagine what had set off this one. Or, he could. He could imagine too many possible triggers, and that got his head going in circles.

"This sucks," Ray said.

Dief whuffed agreement at his side.

Ray sipped at his coffee and squinted some more at the scene. The Jakes homestead was on the northern side of town. Mentally, he matched it against the map pinned to the wall of the station office. This site was just a dot. There was nothing important about the location he could tell, nothing at all.

Charlie prodded gently at the Jakes' kennel's lone standing wall. It was scorched black where the sheetrock hadn't burnt off, and the wood siding on the outside was hanging by a handful of nails and newer boards. He looked up and shook his head. "I don't know what to make of this."

"Me neither," Ray said.

Behind them, Ray could hear Warren Jakes shouting at Fraser, "When I get my hands on the bastard who did this…" and Fraser's quiet calming platitudes. Platitudes were good, since Jakes was near on eighty-five-years-old and mad as a cat about losing his empty kennel. But if he worked himself into having a coronary, then they'd have an even bigger mess on their hands.

Or Fraser would. Ray wasn't supposed to get too involved in the police side of the investigation end. Volunteer firefighters were just supposed to put out fires and fill out reports and talk to the arson and insurance investigators.

But it wasn't like official fire department folks were thick on the ground up here, and people knew that. It was one of the main things Charlie and they kept going back and forth about, trying to get funding for more safety courses and new hoses and all so they could legally have more guys.

Warren went back in the house with a slammed door echoing behind him and Fraser walked down to meet them.

"Fraser," Charlie said with a nod.

"He any help?" Ray said.

Fraser let out a breath and shook his head. He was staring at the blackened rectangle in the wet and blackened dirt. "No known enemies, other than Bill Franklin—"

"Who's been feuding with him since 1948," Ray said.

"And it hasn't ever gotten worse than badmouthing each other to anyone who'll listen over at the diner," Charlie said.

"Or flaming bags of turds on his doorstep."

"Which he admitted was in retaliation for his own like action," Fraser said, "and also, which hasn't taken place since the late 1960s."

"Has he got insurance on the kennel?"  


*  


The second week of August, they torched the old Ferrier place. It was the first time they'd ever lit anything in anger. Joy, recklessness, boredom—hell, even frustrated lust—but never before anger.

It was so goddamned stupid. "I can't believe she did this." Teague swung a fallen branch at a tree, watching the bark fly off. It felt good, so he did it again and again until the branch snapped.

"I can't believe she's actually this selfish."

"Fucking bitch!" he yelled.

Trisha had canceled their autumn enrollment in high school in Whitehorse. Lupine Pass was so small the schools only went from kindergarten to grade nine. After that, you had to go south and either board with a family or live in a dorm.

The school paid for it and there were grants and scholarships for living expenses, but no. She'd grudgingly signed them on for the Distance Learning Program, which was fucking insane. Besides, it wasn't like Trisha needed them at home.

"You think she knows?" Harley asked, thumbing her stainless Zippo nervously.

"What, like this is her demented way of punishing us?" Teague thought it over. She hadn't out and said anything about the fires. She'd just laid it on them over breakfast. No Whitehorse, no throwing her hard-earned money away for them to spend on pot and booze while no one was watching them.

"All of our plans…" Harley began to say.

Teague picked up a rock and hurled it at a hummock of moss deeper in the forest. "Fuck this. Got any fuel on you?"

"No, but there's the emergency bottle of vodka in the badger den. Think this is bad enough to break it out?"

Teague brightened. "Fucking A."

Harley jumped off the barrel she'd been sitting on and started hiking east. Teague fell into step at her side. The badger den was a cave of tumbled down stones hidden by the base of an old gnarled tree. They kept stuff there they couldn't risk their mother finding—or the RCs finding if they ever showed up at their door with a warrant.

Harley pulled out a liter of cheap vodka and a pack of cigarettes. The bottle was plastic and would melt away any fingerprints. She wiped it down with her sleeves all the same. "Where to?" she said.

"Hmm." There were lots of abandoned buildings around. Old cabins, storage sheds, miner's shacks, and so forth. They could even take out a building in town if they were careful. They knew how to make it look like an accident. Except the new Mountie was apparently some kind of Sherlock Holmes freak, to hear the younger ones tell it, and Teague didn't want to risk them getting sent to juvie and getting split up.

But thinking about buildings to burn made him think of their home, and that made him think of Trisha again. "I want it to be something big," he said.

"Yeah." Harley was tamping down the cigarette pack. Then she opened the cellophane and took two out. She lit them both and handed him one. "Here."

"Nasty habit," he said, and breathed in the warm smoke.

"Big," she replied. Then she started listing off likely targets.  


*  


"So what the hell is the motive to burn down buildings out here?" Ray tromped a path back and forth behind their house; the first heavy snow of fall had hit and hit early. Ray shook his head to clear it and started over from scratch for the thousandth time. "What do we got out here? Snow, trees, ice, freezing cold rivers that ain't quite frozen yet, bears, some coal mines—"

"Nickel mines," Fraser put in, "and potentially diamond and gemstone mines, as well."

"Nickel, yeah, but the rest is all spec—speculative, right?" Ray said, tilting his head to Fraser. Red, down at the range, had said the diamond rumors were all a bunch of hogwash. "And what else? A bunch of little towns and hermits living out on their mountain tops, right?"

"And people, Ray. People, who—"

"People who got too much time on their hands, that's what." Ray stomped around, finally stooping to draw a rough map of the arson sites in the snow with a twig. He marked each fire with a pine cone scale.

"Ah," Fraser said, because he probably thought he was being patient. Or helpful.

Except…wait. Exactly who had too much time on their hands around here? Ray looked up, meeting Fraser's eyes. "That's it."

Fraser blew on his tea and set it on the rail to cool slightly. "I'm sorry? I'm afraid I don't follow."

Ray paced his trench in the snow again. Fraser adjusted his hat and leaned back against the porch rail. "Okay," Ray said slowly, "So the guys who live out here mostly work in the mine. A lot of the women, too. And so, like you said, these things are too random to be an insurance scam, and it doesn't make any sense as a revenge thing." Ray stopped. "So who does that leave?"

Fraser shut his eyes. He looked as weary of all this as Ray was. Maybe more so. "Housewives?" Fraser said with almost-audible sarcasm. "Children? The elderly? I may remind you that we ruled out Mr. Jakes."

Ray sighed impatiently. "Fraser, when I was a kid, we smoked weed and went joy-riding in cars. Not with Stella, I mean. I mean with my buddies, when Stell was off with her girlfriends. This was when we were like fifteen and too dumb to…yeah. Or, well, I don't know what you did when you were a crazy teenager, but it makes me wonder what the hell the kids do around here when there's no school to threaten to burn down."

Fraser gazed at Ray in alarm. "Surely no one would—"

"Hell, guys I knew used to call in fake bomb threats to the school all the time. But, you know, that was 1976. World's changed a lot since then."

"And I'm afraid these teenagers have no local school building at all."

"They're all home-schooled out here?"

"Grades ten through twelve have the option of attending a residential school in Whitehorse."

"But they don't gotta. No truant officer's going to knock on their door and force them to move to the city." Ray nodded to himself. "Right."

Fraser lifted his tea carefully down from the rail and sipped deeply. Ray caught him looking and looked back with wry affection. "Ray," Fraser said, "what if it isn't? It could be any transient. It could just as easily be one of your mountain hermits coming into town with…I don't know, a grudge against village life."

"Or, it could be a demented housewife for all we know!" Ray yelled. Fraser rubbed his eyebrow and Ray swallowed down his exasperation. "Sorry. No, you're right. It might not be the kids. I hope it's not the kids because that would suck."

"Yes, it would. For the people of this town, certainly, and also for the family or families of the perpetrators."

Ray shut his eyes. "Got it, okay? I got it. We don't want it to be the kids. We want it to be some smalltime pyro with a lighter in his pocket and a hard-on for flames. And maybe it is. Fuck, I don't know," Ray said, turning away to look at their view of the valley. "Christ."

Behind him, Ray heard Fraser set his mug down and close the few crunching steps between them. Arms circled Ray's waist and Fraser's lips found Ray's neck just under his ear.

For a long time Fraser just stood there, holding him in a reverse bear hug. Gradually, Ray relaxed against him. "We'll find them," Fraser whispered.

Ray swallowed hard. "Yeah. We will. But I'm kind of getting why the brass don't want you making too many close friends out here."

Fraser squeezed him hard, and then relaxed into a looser hold. Ray turned in the embrace, meeting Fraser in an automatic and warm kiss. It lasted a moment, two, and then grew into something hotter, sparks lighting in Ray's balls. Fraser's cock twitched against Ray's thigh, where their hips were pressed together. But then Fraser broke the kiss. A stony look was in his eye.

"What?" Ray said.

"I believe you may be right," Fraser said. "It may be some of the kids."  


*  


"I've lived in the Pass or over in Carmacks my whole life and I have never seen anything like this," Charlie said. They were driving down the valley to the airstrip. Mae Cantrell was running the two o'clock flight to Whitehorse, and with the weather like it was, she wouldn't wait.

"You see much arson in Chicago?" Charlie asked.

"Nah, not in CPD," Ray said automatically, "although, you know my first case with Fraser was arson. She called herself 'Greta Garbo', had her name changed and everything, and thought she was some kind of performance arsonist."

"Performance arsonist?" Charlie said, eyebrow inching up.

Ray started laughing, remembering. "She shot me, too. Center torso. I was wearing Kevlar, else I'd have a hell of a hole in my gut, but yeah. See, she had this crazy boyfriend, literally crazy—asylum crazy—and Ray went on to tell Charlie the story of Fraser's apartment building, the Vecchio house, and driving a burning car into Lake Michigan.

He left out the parts about Fraser touching his inner thigh, but maybe Charlie heard them anyhow, because at the end, he said, "So you and the Mountie—together ever since?"

Ray turned a little pink. He still wasn't used to people just up and asking like that. He shrugged. "Mm, not quite that fast, but more or less. Save each other's lives enough times, you don't want to let 'em go."

"Hunh." Charlie didn't say anything else and Ray didn't know which part Charlie was chewing on. Didn't really matter, he guessed. Ray had been clear about exactly how it was with him and the Mountie since they came to town, so people could go ahead and get themselves used to it.

Charlie turned left, the wheels grinding from gravel road to dirt to more gravel, and they were there.

Ray slid the box out of the back of the truck. "This the firebug stuff?" Mae asked.

"Yup," Charlie answered. He was pulling a folder and clipboard out of the battered old briefcase that lay in the back next to the box. "We have to do the chain of evidence thing again, since I can't come along with you this time."

"Perfectly all right, Charlie. I know the program." She signed and initialed in triplicate and checked the strapping tape on the box. Then she signed the box. "You want me to make Whitehorse FD call you when it goes in?"

"If you could, ma'am." Charlie winked at her and his salt and pepper mustache went up with the corner of his eye.

Mae grinned back at him. "I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks," Charlie said.

"Thanks, Mae," Ray echoed.

"No problem, guys. If this pyro goes after—"

"Don't even say it," Ray said.

Mae's lip curled, and then she let out a gust of breath. "There are going to be a whole lot of angry people when this guy gets caught."

Charlie nodded and cupped her arm with a meaty hand. "Be glad no one's been hurt."

"Right." Mae smiled at them weakly. "All right, then. See you guys later, eh?"

They watched Mae and their box of evidence disappear into a red and white dinky little plane that scared the living crap out of Ray to fly in. It was like sitting in a swing on the schoolyard and flying through the air at God only knew how high, only enclosed in a thin skin of fiberglass. Barely enclosed. Scary as hell.

"Well, come on," Charlie said, and Ray followed him back to the truck.  


*  


Oh, now this was not good. Ray scanned the horizon and the way the clouds were blowing over the treetops. The hills were mostly green with fir trees, with a few naked maples and the occasional rusty patch of diseased trees breaking up the monotony. All those evergreens made a nice dry carpet of pine needles in the forest. Good kindling. And it was dry as tinder this spring, since the drought was still going.

The smoke from the burning house on Metal Mountain was getting thicker. He could hear a far distant siren—the boys from Carmacks, maybe. Ray knew Charlie would be itching to go, but they'd never get the engine across the ancient bridge and up the dirt grade from this direction. And there wasn't enough water up there to fill a bathtub, much less douse a burning fire.

Ray realized he was digging the heels of his boots into the gritty gray soil. They could fucking bury it, smother it to death.

Ray shook his head and cracked his neck. Shit like this pissed him off. Firebugs pissed him off.

He got into the jeep and drove over to the RCMP post. Fraser was outside, helping Charlie pull gear out of the engine.

"Shovels," Ray called. "This wind, it's going to burn down the whole damned mountain."

"Damn." Charlie turned his head, but they were too sheltered here on Main Street for him to see.

"Fraser, quit with the manual labor."

"Ray—"

"I am not in the mood to watch you get turned into a paralyzed guy in a wheelchair right now." Ray glared at him, and he was an asshole for taking his temper out on Fraser, but they both knew he was right. And besides, he'd make it up to him later.

Charlie cleared his throat. "Uh, Corporal, maybe you could get on the radio to Nolan for the latest wind conditions?"

Fraser didn't answer, only glared meaningfully at Ray.

"Uh, yeah, that would be a big help." Ray tried to make it an apology, but also to make the point that someone was burning down his mountain—he did not have that one extra second to be courteous!

Fraser pursed his lips, but only turned and went in.

"Crap," Ray muttered under his breath, but there wasn't time to worry about it. "What we need is a backhoe," he said. "Or a little bobcat dozer. Do we know anybody who's got one of them?"

Charlie handed Ray an ax. "No construction crews around here that I know about." Then he stopped. Ray took the ax before it fell to the ground. "Actually, Reuben Johns has something in his barn that might work." Charlie pulled out his phone and dialed.

What Reuben had in his barn was the front end of a snowplow that bolted onto his old '77 Chevy pickup. If they could get it up the grade to the fire, then they could scoop out some firebreaks fast.

A minute later, Constable Martin joined them. He was a twenty-five year old kid in blue shirtsleeves, but at least he wasn't afraid of hard work. "Corporal Fraser said you need help. He also said to say Nell Halsey offered the use of her ATVs."

"Hot damn," Ray said, yanking a pair of shovels out of the back of the fire engine. "Go get one and we'll tie on the tools."

Martin looked around and then back at Ray. Ray had forgotten Martin was new.

"Blue house behind the church," Ray said.

"Ah, yes! I'll be right back!" Martin said, and dashed off.

"I'll get Reuben," Charlie called, jogging to his truck.

Ray went and pulled the others' fire gear from their lockers. Jim was headed up there already, hiking in from the back to see if the old spring had any water in it. Vicki and Josiah were supposed to be prepping the air tanks. If it got into the trees, they were going to be fucked.  


*  


"Shit!" He'd wanted big. He didn't want a fucking inferno on the mountain.

"Help me!" Harley yelled. She had her arms full of deadfall cleared from the path of the fire, and was trying to drag a dead sapling along under her elbow.

"This goddamned wind," Teague said half under his breath. It had come up out of nowhere. They were too close to town. There wasn't any water up here for the firemen to dump on the flames, and already he'd burned his hands trying to keep the beautiful fucker under control.

He helped Harley add fuel to the back of the fire, into the wind, and then they both returned to the front to stamp out flying cinders.

The fire raged. She was gorgeous. She was devouring everything they fed her. Ravenous. Commanding.

"You beautiful goddamned thing, stop spreading," Harley gritted out, stamping on a flame licking up a clump of dry grass.

Teague put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. "We need to split, like now. They'll be up any minute."

Harley skated her heel over another half dozen cinders. "Yeah, all right."

"Where do you think we ought to hide out?" Teague said.

"How about the pool at the community center?" she said. She was already walking across the hilltop, heading away from the RCMP station.

Teague caught up, glancing back time and again to make sure the big trees weren't catching. There was a lot of smoke in the air; it was getting hard to tell where the fire stopped and he was getting a little afraid that they hadn't contained it well enough. "They'll smell the smoke on our clothes."

"Oh hell, you're right." They thought frantically for a while, as they scrambled down through the woods.

"Bush party? We could say we built the bonfire," Teague suggested.

"We could crash Randall and Tova's. They wouldn't care."

"I bet they're drunk enough already not to notice," he agreed. Then he felt his earlier rage coming back. He felt it in the lingering heat from the fire on his skin. "That unbelievable bitch," he growled. "You think she drank our school money?"

"Who needs a future anyway?" Harley swallowed hard and scrubbed the back of a hand over her eyes. Then she shook her head clear. "Come on. We have to get out of here before anyone sees us."

"Wait," he said. "You've got streaks." He stuck his thumb in his mouth and scrubbed at the lines of soot and sweat on her face. "There."

She bumped her shoulder against his and he wrapped her in a loose, brotherly headlock. Her hair smelled like smoke, but she also smelled like home, like safety, no matter what crazy shit their mom—or they themselves—had gotten into. They were still the Helkik Twins, the Dynamic Duo, and self-admitted hellions because what else were they going to be? They'd find a way out of this mess somehow.  


*  


"Looks like you folks have a firebug on your hands." Will Baumgarten was the arson investigator finally sent up by the Whitehorse Fire Commissioner after the third request from Bob Gilday, the Lupine Pass mayor. Baumgarten's tone was just patronizing enough to get under Ray's skin.

"Yes, we believe that is the case," Fraser said in his too-patient, can-we-get-to-the-point-already voice.

Ray took his cue and cut in. "Yeah, so, we got seven normal fires here," he said, pointing to his chart. The normal ones were all marked in green for okay. "Then we have these four, where Charlie and Fraser confirmed there were accelerants. And then there's these other three." Ray pointed to the three circled in yellow. "Those we're not sure about."

"What's the evidence say?"

"Nothing suspicious," Fraser said.

"Yeah, but they just don't feel…right," Ray said with a scowl.

"Ray has a hunch," Fraser added. Fraser was doing that a lot lately, and it was really getting on Ray's nerves.

"Yeah, I got a hunch," he agreed, pacing across the room and back, folding and unfolding his arms. "And you know why? This guy, he doesn't want to hurt anybody. He hasn't messed with shipping or delivery or food or bars. He _has_ messed with empty cabins, a condemned building, a tourist supply, and the, the hunt museum, what's it called?"

"The Caribou Cultural Center?" Will read off the wall.

"Yeah, that," Ray said. "Why that? It just has a bunch of stuff about hunting in it."

Fraser went into encyclopedia-mode. "The history of caribou hunting from prehistoric times through the early northern exploration and fur-trading era, continuing up to commercial hunting parties in the present day. Also, unlike the other large blazes, this fire was extinguished before it could do more than scorch a bit of carpet and a single wall."

"So maybe they got surprised and had to run. Whatever." Ray pushed off the desk and started to pace. "Point is, there's stuff there from all kinds of people, so it wasn't a hate crime. But what was it? What's the tie-in?"

"Size, possibly?" Will said. It's a fairly large building near the center of town.

"Okay," Ray agreed. "Attention...and maybe something about the hunting. The tourist gear shop, that's mostly hunters getting their gear. And crazy adventurers sometimes," he added, shooting a softer look at Fraser. Fraser smiled back and Ray relaxed a little. Maybe he'd get to make up for his rotten mood with Fraser at home that night.

As it stood, Fraser had spent most of the past month processing arrests for drunk and disorderlies. Prior to that, before the melt, it was drunk and disorderlies and drunken snowmobiling, _and_ investigating pranks where the pranksters took the victims' skidoos and helpfully parked them on the other side of town, on the center of the frozen river, or somewhere incriminating, like in front of a liquor store or the two-bit motel. At least a dozen different people were in on it—possibly two or three times that number, because apparently people in Lupine Pass went a little crazy in the winter and couldn't just stay home and watch hockey on TV like normal people—and who knew what these people got up to in the summer. Nobody was telling the Mounties—or Ray—anything.  


*  


October  


Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Harley fell onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow. Teague was in the shower, scrubbing off the butane he'd spilled all over himself while refilling his lighter. Their mother was at work, thank freaking God. The Mounties were on their trail. She knew it. They had to be. The cute one, Corporal Fraser, kept looking at her when she walked down Main Street to the grocery store. It was creepy. He didn't do anything; he just watched her.

They needed a plan. A new, better plan. They were in too much danger of getting caught.

Harley shut her eyes tight and thought about fire. Flames licking up the sides of a post, streaking over a plaster wall, consuming, like Pele the volcano goddess in Hawaii demanding her offerings. Fire remakes the world. Fire cleanses and renews. _Fire helps._

"You okay?" Teague asked. Harley rolled over, scowling at him when she saw he had a towel wrapped around his waist and his long hair was dripping all over the floor. She blotted her tears in the hank of her ponytail.

"What's going on?" said Teague, sitting down across from her.

"You need a haircut."

"Whatever. What's wrong?"

"RCs are going to have a warrant any time now."

"What? What happened?" Teague leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

Harley shook her head. "It's just the way the corporal was watching me at the store. Like he knows."

"You think he does?"

"Yeah."

"You think he has any proof?"

"Shit, Teague, maybe? I don't know! What does he need? Footprints to and from the fires? Fingerprints on stuff near the scenes?"

Teague got to his feet and, refastening his towel, began to pace the cluttered length between their beds. Harley dug her Zippo from the pocket of her leather jacket and started flicking the spark wheel with her thumb. Teague sat down, shoving her over with his hip until she sat up. He put one arm around her and squeezed tight. "Don't panic. They aren't going to dust every freaking tree in the forest."

"Says you," she mumbled, sniffling. "Maybe his stupid dog can place us there—they only need to tie us to one. After that, they'll nail us for all of them."

"Mm, I guess."

"The kennel was stupid," she muttered half to herself.

"The kennel was awesome," he said fiercely. "We needed it. You know we did."

He didn't move, and she was glad. The warm weight at her side was what she needed. The Helkik twins against the world, like before. Together, they could do anything.

"So what do you want to do?" There was the barest pressure of his arm against hers as he spoke, like he was reading her mind.

Harley swallowed. "I don't know?" She was pretty sure it didn't matter. They'd let things get out of hand, and now they were up a creek no matter what they did.

"I think maybe we screwed the pooch when we lit the store."

"Or the cultural center."

"That barely even—"

"Still. It was too much," she snapped. She shrugged his arm off her shoulder, suddenly pissed off all over again. "Nobody cares about old rundown shacks."

"Fuck," he muttered.

"I have ninety-eight dollars saved. How much do you have?"

"Sixty-five."

She turned on him with a glare. "I thought we—"

He lifted his hands, palms out. "Hey! Chill. I got a carton of cigs, some butane; I grabbed some food, some other shit."

Dammit. "We need to get out of the Territory."

"They'll notice."

"After a few days, sure, but if we can make it to Calgary, we can disappear." They had to get the hell out of Lupine Pass before it was too late. "We could hitch."

Teague shut his eyes. He knew she was right, she knew it. "Who do we even know in Calgary?" he said.

"Mari's brothers. Joey's cousin Julie. Everybody whose parents moved down to work for PetroCan when the Double-G Mine closed."

"Like they wouldn't narc on us."

Which…crap. He had a point. "Do you have a better plan?"

"I might if you'd let me have a minute to think about it!" he said, glaring.

"Whatever," she answered, nearly growling. "Go put some freaking clothes on, naked-boy. You'll catch pneumonia."  


*  


Teague huffed loudly and stomped out of their bedroom. He dropped the towel on the linoleum in the hallway and yanked his underwear drawer half out of the living room chest of drawers, nearly toppling the television. He dressed where he stood: briefs, jeans, socks, and shirts, and shuffled back toward their bedroom. He kicked his damp towel toward the washroom doorway; it didn't quite make it inside, but so the fuck what.

"So how are we going to feed ourselves? Where are we going to live?" Harley said from where she lay. "What's the master plan to keep us from turning into a couple of teenage whores?"

"Harley—"

"Are you kidding me?" She rolled to face him. "Do you want to live off giving twenty dollar blowjobs? You've seen _My Own Private Idaho_, and you're not half as cute as River Phoenix."

He had. It was depressing as shit.

But he had an idea. She was going to hate it, but it might work.  


*  


"Can I ask you something?" It was the end of the day. Ray was still at the river helping Charlie clean up after running through an afternoon of pump truck equipment drills with Vicki and Josiah. They'd left to pick up their kids from school, and Ray was staring down the hole they'd cut in the ice for water while Charlie cranked the hose back onto its reel.

"What's up?" Charlie answered.

Ray rubbed the back of his head through his parka's hood. "I, uh, wanted to ask if you knew anything about any of the local kids. Loners, angry rebels, kids getting abused? Anything like that?"

Charlie raised his eyebrows and made the brim of his yellow firefighter's hat tilt up. "Angry teenagers are a universal constant, I thought."

Ray snorted. "Yeah, yeah I get that. Boy, do I get that. But whoever's doing this has got to have some serious anger issues. And not like they're angry at just one person. This isn't some guy pissed off that his girlfriend found somebody new."

Charlie nodded.

"So I wonder who doesn't go to the community center. Who doesn't go to the local hockey games or bonspiels?"

"Lots of folks, but kids? Let me think a minute. The internet and those Playstation things is what a lot of them are doing now."

"Yeah, yeah," Ray said, nodding. "So who doesn't have that? I mean, this town isn't so different from other places I've been. Every town has its share of throwaways, doesn't it?"

A shadow crossed Charlie's face. He didn't speak for a long time, and then he said, "How's this? Your mother's a crazy alcoholic—mostly Dene but without Indian status. She got knocked up young."

"Happens," Ray said.

"The father's married to another woman. He's a big muckety-muck in the community. Has a bunch of kids of his own. He has status, but he never acknowledged you as his, so you don't qualify for government support."

"And if I'm not on the rolls, the reserve can't help me."

"Right."

"This sounds like a maybe."

"Gets better. Say your mother drinks away your money set aside for going south for high school and then won't sign the forms saying you can go. Stay home and do the Distance Program, she tells you."

"Oh, shit."

"So, all your friends move down to Whitehorse," Charlie continued, "but you can't, because your mother's a nutcase alcoholic. And everyone in town knows all about it."

"That's an angry kid."

Charlie nodded. He stowed the last of the hose and swung the reel back in place. Then he added, "And you have a twin sister."

Ray swallowed. "I've seen these kids."

"The Helkik twins. Trisha Helkik's kids."

"Right. And why haven't they been on our suspect list so far?" Ray asked.

Charlie laid his hands on the truck's back door and gave Ray a disbelieving look. "They're only sixteen, if that." He slammed the door shut and walked around to the cab. Ray got in the passenger side. Charlie continued, "They never made any threats. They're in a bad situation, but they never did anything like…whatever you'd expect from delinquents in the big city."

Ray opened his mouth to argue, but shut it fast. He knew damned well what pissed off Chicago kids were capable of, and it spelled gang war. Lupine Pass, or Little Podunk as he sometimes thought of it, had its share of adolescent shits, but he knew what Charlie was saying. Around here, stuff like this didn't happen.

Charlie gave her the gas and got the truck up the embankment. From there it was a snowy crawl back to the station. "They've never been violent," he mused. "They used to be pretty well thought of, actually. Four or five years ago, they were really into the elders' Rediscovery Program. Learning the old ways and all."

"So, they know how to do stuff like build campfires and live in the woods?" Ray said.

Charlie pursed his lips and made a gesture toward the left. "Trish works at the motel up on the highway."

"I'd rather have Fraser get us a warrant, unless you really trust this woman to know anything about what her kids are up to."

"If it's them," Charlie said, quietly.

"If it's them," Ray agreed, scowling.

"Could be a crazy from Earth First."

Ray sighed. "Nah, doesn't feel right. Not here. That kind would go after the mines, not risk burning down half the Range."

Charlie grunted, but it didn't sound like he disagreed.

After wiping down the engine, they went out one door and into the next, into the RCMP station, where Fraser was on the radio. Constable Martin was out in the field with Constable Coleman dealing with another case of hilariously misplaced skidoos.

They waited patiently until Fraser finished his conversation, then Charlie laid out their new theory.

Fraser rubbed an eyebrow. "All right," he said, "I'll go by their house and see if the children are at home. Ray, perhaps you could interview their mother at her place of work?"

"Would I spook her?" Ray asked Charlie.

"Yeah. She'd think you were spying on her for the government and were trying to take her kids away. I'll go."

Fraser nodded grimly. "I'm sure that's wise, especially under the circumstances."

"Come on," Ray said to Fraser. "We can check out the house. Maybe ask the neighbors if they've seen anything suspicious lately."

"Right you are, Ray." Fraser clapped him gently on the shoulder and led him to the RCMP Jeep while Charlie headed out to his own truck. From the Jeep, Fraser radioed the constables what they were up to, and Martin promised to be back in a dash to watch the station.

Laughing, Ray shook his head. In a million years, he would never get over this place.  


*  


If they'd had more time, Teague would have been able to come up with a better plan than just walking into Sully Ross' real estate office while his secretary was out and refusing to go away. Sully didn't know who he was at first. Then Teague said, "My mother's name is Trisha Helkik," and Sully's face turned a little gray.

"You should leave now, before I call the RCMP station."

"You do that, and we can tell them all about the sixteen years of child support you owe me and my sister."

Sully swallowed. "What do you want?"

"Harley and I are moving south. We thought you might like to contribute to our travel fund."

"Travel fund?" Sully snorted. "You don't have the first idea of what you're saying."

Teague fought back the urge to get in the guy's face. He took a couple of breaths and looked around the office. Then he turned and said, "Yeah, so I was thinking maybe I should ask Corporal Fraser to arrange a paternity test. He seems like the sort of cop who would take an interest." Teague put a spin on the last words like his old grade eight history teacher used to when emphasizing stuff that would be on the test, except he knew he didn't sound half as nice as old Mrs. Dunson.

Sully tried for a minute to stare him down, but then Teague saw the shine of sweat spring out on Sully's forehead and knew he'd won.

Sully rapped the desk with his knuckles a few times, as if convincing himself of what needed doing, and stood up. "All right. Why don't I just walk next door to the bank?"

"We need a thousand," Teague said.

"What? Are you kidding?" Sully stared across the room at him. "I can't just pull out a thousand dollars without reason. Someone will notice."

Teague folded his arms across his chest and tried staring him down in turn. Sully was losing his hair and was pretty thick through the middle. Soft. "Down payment?" Teague suggested. "Say you're making reservations? I don't care what excuse you give them, just do it."

"Look, kid—"

"My name's Teague, and don't think I won't call the RC's. They'd be here in five minutes and you know it."

Sully looked sick. "Stay here," he said after a long, tense minute. "I'm going to lock you in. Don't answer the door if my secretary comes back before I do."

Teague tilted his head and tried not to blink. Sully put on his coat and hurried outside.

As soon as he was gone, Teague started rifling through drawers. He wasn't sure what he was looking for; he didn't want any mementos of his asshole sperm donor. But he found a twenty dollar bill under the pen tray in his center drawer. There was another thirty and change in the can on top of the break room fridge. Teague left the change. There were some snack-sized bars of Cadbury chocolate in a bag in the freezer; he pocketed a handful of those, too.

Sully returned within ten minutes with a fat envelope stuffed into his breast pocket. His cheeks were reddened by the cold. He'd gone out without a hat. "So the deal is that if I give you this, neither you or your sister will ever bother me again. Is that right?"

Teague nodded. "That works for us."

"And where is she, by the way?"

"Running her share of the errands."

"Ah." Sully seemed at a loss. Teague put out his hand. Sully shook it, and Teague laughed. He pointed at the envelope bulging from Sully's coat. "Oh, yes, I see." He placed the envelope in Teague's hand. Teague ran a thumb over the bills, counting quickly and trying to keep his breath steady. He was holding a thousand bucks. He'd done it.

"Thanks," he said, surprised to realize he meant it.

For a moment he and Sully Ross only looked at each other. Then Sully said, "Good luck," and Teague left.  


*  


"Oh my god, tell me you did not!" Harley shoved her feet in her boots, grabbed her coat, and shoved past Teague to get out the door. Still dressed for outdoors, he followed close behind.

"Harley, wait!" She didn't. She was too angry. She stomped straight out into the bush behind their crappy little house, far enough so their mother wouldn't hear if she randomly decided to come home for lunch. "Harley," Teague said again when she finally stopped.

She shoved past a low-hanging branch so the snow would hit Teague in the face. Then she wheeled on him. "You dumb shit! You think he won't go straight to the RCs with this?"

"Why would he?" he said, wiping his face.

"Maybe to get back the money you extorted out of him?" she yelled.

"Oh, bullshit! How is it extortion if it's true? It's not our fault he cheated on his wife!" he yelled back. "And it's a fuck of a lot cheaper for him than showing up demanding sixteen years of child support for the two of us."

"You're going to get us caught, you moron." Her voice broke and fell away.

Teague draped an arm around her shoulders. "We're getting the hell out of here, moron." He smiled at her affectionately until she smiled back. Then he said, "Want to borrow a skidoo?"

"Why?"

He made an impatient face at her. "So we can hitch a ride from someplace nobody knows us, maybe?"

That made sense, at least. And at least he wasn't saying they should blow the grand on a bush plane. "Yeah, all right," she said.

"Let's pack up." Teague turned his back and headed back into their tiny house. "I figure if we're lucky, we can go east and south until we hit either Highway 4 or 6." He paused, blocking her way on the threshold, and half-turned. "We're still going for Calgary, right?"

"Yeah," she said, shoving past him. "Let's see what we have that we can sell."

"Let's see how much we can carry. It's a long-ass trip."

Harley worried at her lower lip. "And how far we can get on a single can of petrol?"

Teague stopped in the living room and turned around. "Crap."

"Siphon?" she suggested. That's what they'd done to get the fuel to light the store. It was gross, but it worked.

Teague made a face like sucking lemons. "If we siphon, drive the rivers, camp in the bush, hunt or fish and live on granola—"

Harley covered her face with her hands. "I can't believe we're serious. How are we seriously considering this?"

"Right, because the whole town isn't calling for blood from the Lupine Pass Arsonist. They'd tie us to trees and leave us for bears to eat," Teague said.

"We're still minors," Harley protested weakly. Teague got their heavy-duty camp packs and one bedroll out from under their beds. "What about mine?" Harley said.

"You want to sleep alone or you want to give up the spare petrol can? Besides, it's warmer to share."

Harley grumbled, but turned her attention back to choosing clothes. Then she went through her jewelry box. There were plastic kids' rings from school that the teachers gave as prizes. There was a tarnished silver necklace and a couple of broken digital watches. She thought briefly of rifling through their mother's jewelry box, but she knew it contained only the cheapest costume jewelry. Everything of value, she'd pawned long ago for liquor money.

They had a little over eleven hundred dollars in cash, and that was more than enough petrol money to get them to Calgary. The difficulty would be in finding gas stations where they weren't known and wouldn't be recognized once someone noticed they'd taken off.

"Do we still have that roadmap of Western Canada?" she asked.

Teague blinked. "Maybe. I'll check." He disappeared into the living room and she heard something topple from the bookshelf. Not a good sign.

Harley went into their mother's bedroom, then. It was a sty, littered with bottles and trash and dirty laundry, but also lined with tall cardboard boxes full of their summer clothes, old shoes, and miscellaneous junk accumulated from years of failed attempts at spring cleaning. Things were never sorted, only swept into a handy box and stacked atop the last.

After several minutes of digging, Harley unearthed Teague's old caribou skin anorak from reclamation camp. Her own was too small for her now, but she would need something warm to take in place of her bright red parka. She tried on the larger anorak. The sleeves were a little long, but it would do.

Her thermals were in her dresser. She had a good pair of snow pants. Her boots were okay. She wondered if she should turn the old caribou coat into better, warmer mittens for them. If she could find the box with the leather needle, it wouldn't take long at all.

Teague stood in the doorway behind her. "Did you find the rifle?"

She started. "Don't scare me like that!" Then, "I haven't looked yet. I thought she sold it?"

"Hope not." Teague crouched down and looked under their mother's bed.

"We don't have a license for it."

He snorted at her. "We're on the run, Harl, what do you want?"

She ran her hands through her hair and eventually let out a long breath. How could he expect her to think straight when the cops could be there any minute? "I hate this."

"I know, but I have a plan, eh?"

"Yeah?" she said hopefully.

"We get to Calgary, we find someone to make us some fake IDs, we get jobs. Maybe we can take some classes next term?"

Only his plan had a giant hole in it. "And where do we live?"

"They have shelters," he answered, shrugging. "Start thinking about what name you want."

She made a face of disgust. This dingy bedroom. The boxes of accumulated crap. The bottles. "I freaking hate this place," she gritted out.

Teague didn't answer for a long moment, and when he did it was brittle and low. "Me, too."

"Want to torch it?"

"More than anything." He made a noise like a broken laugh. "But it'd be, like, the most obvious confession we could make."

Harley couldn't say anything to that. The ache in her chest was too hot, too hard, and spread to her throat with a flood of enraged tears behind it. She swallowed it down. After a while, as Teague went through the nightstand and dresser drawers in search of a gun, Harley jerked her chin toward the unsearched walk-in closet. "Look for the tent?"

"Oh, right," Teague answered.

Harley rubbed at her brow. They were so screwed.  


*  


Nobody was home at the Helkik house when Ray and Fraser stopped by. They walked around the place anyway. The snow was trampled down out toward the edge of the bush and along the path to the empty carport. Its frozen gravel paving was rutted with tracks that fit Trisha Helkik's '88 Ford beater. The half of the building belonging to the old beauty salon was dilapidated. Ray saw Fraser wrinkle his nose as they circled around and back to the other half of the house. It was no place Ray would pay to live. That, and it was tiny. The idea of an adult and two teenagers sharing less than eight hundred square feet? It made him twitch. Ray needed room to move.

Fraser apparently sensed his agitation and led them away from the house and off toward the woods. The bush, they said here, which Ray had finally stopped laughing at.

"They spend quite a bit of time out here," Fraser said.

Ray had managed one peek through a dingy window. "I guess it's better than the alternative."

Fraser hummed.

"What?"

Fraser stood up straighter and cocked his head. Then he looked further into the trees.

"What, are they coming?"

"Who?"

"The twins!" Ray hissed.

"Ah, no. However, I do suspect a rather large bear is headed this way, and I believe it's safest not to stand between a bear and an available garbage can."

"Uh, yeah, we should go, then," Ray said, turning on his heel. Fraser turned in time with him, and they quick-stepped it back to the Jeep. "Right," Ray breathed. "So, neighbors?"

"Ah, yes," Fraser said after a moment. "Well, let's see." The Helkik house was the last on the street before a quarter of a mile of undeveloped road; and after that, a pothole-ridden turn to the right took you back to Juniper Way, the main thoroughfare, if anyone could call it that, on this side of Main Street. "Across the street is the Watts' residence. I believe they are wintering in California this year."

"Lucky bastards," Ray said.

Fraser shot him a look, but Ray ignored it. "Who's next door?"

Calling it "next door" was generous, too, as there was at least a football field of space between the Helkik house and the next actual house on the road. In between were two empty, ruined, overgrown spaces where houses either never were or used to be. The woods were eating the lots. The bush was eating them. Ray let out an uncontrolled laugh. It wasn't funny. It was creepy. And some woman was raising kids out here.

Fraser was frowning at him. "Sorry, what'd you say?" Ray said.

"I said, are you all right? And before that I said that the people in the next house up are the Johnstons, and I believe they're at work."

"Oh, okay. Want we should go track them down?"

Fraser nodded. "It may be worth asking if they have a few moments to spare."

Ray put the truck in gear. Turning left would take them toward Juniper Way a lot faster than the way they'd come in. Ray turned right. He glanced at Fraser surreptitiously, but Fraser saw. Fraser had an eyebrow raised and that patient look on his face. "Look, it's just spooky, okay? Doesn't this place creep you out?"

Fraser tilted his head, considering.

"Never mind," Ray said, quirking a smile. "You're the guy who thinks Lou Skagnetti is a scary story."

"My father used to say, 'One should never allow the land to become bigger than it is.' "

Ray mulled that one for a minute. "What the hell does that mean?" he asked finally.

"Well, the Canadian wilderness is a vast and daunting, if not outright terrifying, place. There's nowhere in the world quite like it."

"And it can kill a guy in a minute,"

"In inclement weather, yes."

"You're talking about legends again, aren't you? Like Dudley Do-Right and Sergeant Preston."

Fraser rubbed his eyebrow. "Well, yes and no. I believe my father meant that survival in the bush is arduous enough without piling additional, irrational fears on top of matters."

"Not to mention the bear back there."

"Well, of course. I should think the bears go without saying."

Ray cocked an eye at Fraser for a moment, and then shook his head. "Yeah, okay, but what I meant was that just from looking at this place we have corroboration that the mother's a basketcase and the kids are a couple of seriously disturbed individuals. I mean, honestly, who lives like that?"

Fraser hummed again, sounding resigned. "That may well be true, Ray, but the matter at hand is: are any of them arsonists?"  


*  


They stole a skidoo in the morning. Borrowed, whatever. They set it up so it looked like another one of the prank thefts that was going around, only Teague didn't park it at the town rink or anything. He came home, jittering with coffee and adrenaline. Harley already had a thermos of coffee and two more full of soup packed and ready. They slung packs over the snowmobile and each wore a backpack over their cold weather gear. Outside, the sun was barely a blue glimmer in the east, though it was past ten in the morning. It made Harley feel better. They were in good shape. They could do this, winter be damned.

She let Teague drive because he was taller and made a good windbreak. They had goggles on top of being bundled up in a million layers, with hoods and scarves masking their faces. She was pretty sure they could rely on being anonymous for a little while. Just two people on a snowmobile.

The Pelly Mountains were a smaller branch of the Rockies—a low shoulder. They had to snake their way east and south to get down the side of their mountain without using the highway. Once they reached the river it would be a simple, squiggly road east, but they wanted to be as far from Lupine Pass as they could get before they dared the main road.

Hours passed and the sun rose. It circled around the sky as Harley watched from behind her brother's back. The only sound was the motor under them, shaking Harley to the bone. They stopped every once in a while to pee or drink coffee or soup, refilling the containers with clean snow as they emptied. They stopped once to pour their can of spare fuel into the tank. After that, with Teague complaining of the frosty wind, Harley drove for a while.

It was full dark when they ran out of gas. They were in the middle of the river, on ice as smooth as glass under its dusty cover of snow. The sky was streaked magenta with aurora borealis and the stars glittered like jewels. Without the wind in their faces it felt a little warmer, but it was still freaking cold.

"Here," Harley said, digging out a thermos of soup.

"Thanks," Teague said, taking a mitten off to twist off the canister's lid with gloved fingers. After a while, he said, "We could camp here or hike for a while."

Harley nodded. She'd been thinking about it, too. "Better to get as far as we can before we sleep. Besides, if we're lucky, we'll find somebody's empty house and be able to sleep inside."

"Good idea," he said.

They left the skidoo and fuel can. They kept the bedroll, camp bag, and their backpacks and refilled their old survival-course insulated water bags with clean snow and slung them between their coats and backpacks.

"The highway's that way," Teague said with a jerk of his chin. "Ten kilometers, you think?"

Harley was skeptical. "More like forty."

"No way. Fifteen, tops."

They set off, arguing about the distance because it was better than worrying about bears—or whether the police were trailing them. With any luck at all, they'd get away.

After about ten kilometers they found a snowy gravel track, but decided it must have been a logging road or something. It was too narrow and unused to constitute a real highway, and a gibbous moon was high in the sky by the time they reached it. They turned north along the path and followed the road until they reached a low, rickety bridge. There was no one for miles around.

"We should have gotten snowshoes," Harley said.

"Hey, if we find a house, let's look for skis."

"Ooh, yeah. That's a plan."

A thin, snowy animal path made a track through the trees, and they followed it east, going as fast as they could. There would be a highway further south where they could hitch a ride to civilization.  


*  


Regrettably, Mr. Johnston was quite a way down the mine and wouldn't be available to speak to Fraser and Ray until his shift ended hours later. Mrs. Johnston, however, worked at the Bay and managed to take a short break to answer their questions.

"Yeah, we wondered if you could tell us anything about the Helkik kids?" Ray asked, unconsciously pulling on the old Chicago cop attitude he'd always used to question witnesses back in the States.

Lena Johnston fingered her graying hair and looked at them nervously, and Fraser cleared his throat. "It would be a great help to us if you could share anything that comes to mind."

She shrugged. "I'm not sure what to say. They run wild, what with their mother being how she is. They ought to be in school, if you ask me. Not gallivanting around at all hours. And if they don't want to be in school, they ought to be working. But they were smart kids, when they were young. It's a shame to see them turn out like this."

"Do you know where they spend their time?" Fraser asked.

"Oh, heavens, I don't know. We aren't friendly with their family, of course, but I see them around now and then. One or another of them comes in for groceries. I understood they were on Support."

"They do the Distance Course thing?" Ray asked.

She seemed startled by the question. "I wouldn't know. I assumed they had dropped out. I suppose they're in trouble with the law now?"

"Thanks for your time," Ray said, cutting her off.

Fraser said, "Ah, well, that remains to be seen. Thank you kindly for speaking with us."

On the way out of the store, Ray said, "So, I want to know why they aren't in school."

"Yes," Fraser agreed. He had heard the rumor from Charlie that the twins' mother had spent the money saved for their high school living expenses, but a student advocacy counselor should have intervened if the children had wanted to go on to high school in Whitehorse.

On the way back up Main Street, Ray's phone rang. It was Vicki, calling him to a heater fire over on Eagle Street. "Can I drop you here?" Ray asked, incongruously speeding up.

"Of course. I take it the fire was accidental?"

"Yeah. Little kids and heaters, you know." Ray ran a stop sign and lurched to a stop in front of the RCMP station. Ahead of them in the road, the town's fire engine was already en route.

Fraser slid out of the jeep, calling, "Good luck!" and Ray sped away in the wake of the screaming siren.

Inside, Constable Martin had a stack of telephone messages for Fraser. "Here you are, Corporal. Shall I go attend to the fire now?"

"Yes, please," Fraser said. "See that the family has shelter if they need it."

"Yes, sir," Martin said, and bundled into his parka.

Fraser took off his coat and hat and flipped through the pink message slips on his way to the station kitchen: a call from the neurosurgeon in Whitehorse; another missing snowmobile; a message from Marlene at the community center inviting him to attend a Mites League hockey game the following afternoon. He brewed a mug of hot tea and returned to his desk.

It was midafternoon. Hopefully Ray would be able to debrief Charlie at the scene of the fire. Fraser would much prefer to speak to Ms. Helkik personally, but he didn't wish to endanger the investigation by 'spooking' her. Still…perhaps there were other options. Tea forgotten, ten minutes later, he was walking the few blocks north to the Lupine Pass School.

Classes were almost over for the day, but he was able to request a few minutes from Lucy Brown, the principal. She was a small, dark woman with a crisp voice and a sharp eye, but she smiled as she explained, "We teach only grades K through nine here, of course. We don't have the facilities to serve the older kids' needs."

Fraser nodded, sitting very erect in the uncomfortable visitor's chair. "What I wonder," Fraser said patiently, "is how Harley and Teague Helkik came to be enrolled in the Distance Learning Program instead of attending school in Whitehorse. From what I understand, they were fairly good students when they were here."

Mrs. Brown touched her hair thoughtfully. "It's an interesting question. I remember teaching them both several years ago. They were good students—very smart, if poorly socialized. I'm sure I expected them to move on to high school in Whitehorse with their classmates."

"And yet, they didn't. Do you know of anything that might have caused this?"

She drummed her fingers on her desk. "Well, Corporal, the school went through a transition where a number of staff needed to leave."

"You're referring to when the Double-G Mine closed," said Fraser.

Mrs. Brown nodded. "Yes, exactly. It was, frankly, an organizational mess."

This was less than hopeful news, although it offered some confirmation of the children's state of mind. "Would there be a record," he asked, "of whether the Helkik siblings initially planned to go to school in Whitehorse?"

"Yes, there ought to be. I'll just have a look."

Fraser waited, resisting the urge to stand up and pace, while she accessed the file on her computer. Outside her window, against the dark backdrop of evergreen forest, he saw that it had begun to snow.

"They were, yes," Mrs. Brown said at last. "Their places were cancelled in late summer, just before they were due to attend Orientation. According to our records, their mother made the change. I'm sure we have the forms she signed in the storage facility."

Fraser didn't doubt it. "And is there any evidence of whether either of the siblings attempted to protest their mother's action?" he asked.

A couple of minutes passed. Mrs. Brown typed quickly and clicked rapidly from one screen to the next. Eventually she said in a slow, troubled voice, "It seems the school was without a student advocacy counselor for a number of months that year."

"So if they attempted to protest their situation, it would have gone unanswered," Fraser concluded.

"Probably so, unfortunately, unless they contacted the Whitehorse school directly." Fraser pursed his lips, judging the likelihood of that happening. Mrs. Brown continued, "Of course, that would be terribly rare in students barely aged fifteen."

"Minors," Fraser said, "with little or no parental support and hardly expert at navigating the labyrinth of the territorial educational system."

The lines around Mrs. Brown's eyes deepened. "They're sixteen now, meaning their enrollment preference is a matter to be worked out with their distance program's school administration." She sighed. "They certainly do have the right to protest their mother's action. Unfortunately, it's rather late for any of us here to be able to remedy it."

Fraser shook his head, resigned. "No, I agree. It's a matter for other authorities now."  


*  


Trisha Helkik hadn't been free to talk when Charlie stopped by the Lupine Pass Motel earlier. There had been a long line of winter sightseers checking in and checking out, and only her to run the desk. After Charlie and Ray had finished dealing with the heater fire and left the family in the capable hands of Constable Martin, Ray decided they should swing by for a second try. Ray parked Fraser's battered Jeep in front of the motel office and got out before Charlie could tell him he'd handle it alone. Ray wanted a look at her. Call it his old cop instincts crying out to be used again—and too bad he couldn't throw her in an interrogation room, but whatever—he wanted to see her face when Charlie said her kids' names.

Charlie got ahead of Ray in the lobby and strode ahead to the empty registration desk just as a woman came out of the office behind the counter. She was thin under her gray sweater and worn-looking. She had a jaded glint to her black eyes, and that, more than her faded looks, marked the family resemblance with her children.

"Charlie," she said mildly, not smiling.

"Good to see you, Trish," Charlie said. Ray hung back by the door, playing wallflower, watching. She didn't return the pleasantry, but only looked from Charlie to Ray. Ray met her gaze with a nod but didn't say anything. She looked back to Charlie and waited.

Charlie sighed. "I wanted to ask you a few questions, if you wouldn't mind."

"You can ask," she said. Her gaze was still level. She seemed like one cool customer, or else she faked it really well.

Ray could only see Charlie's back from where he stood, but he could imagine him biting back a scowl. What he said was, "Do you know the whereabouts of Teague and Harley?"

She shrugged. "They ought to be at home."

"Have you seen them today?"

She frowned at them. "What have they done?"

Charlie leaned on one elbow and looked back toward Ray before casting a paternal look at her. "Trisha, tell me something. Why aren't they down in Whitehorse in school with their friends? They're too smart for correspondence classes."

Trisha's face went stony. "How I raise my kids is my business, Charlie. Now if they aren't in trouble, I think you better get out of here."

"And if they are?" Ray said, speaking up before Charlie could.

"Then somebody would've called," she said. Then she squinted at Ray harder. "You're the Mountie's…boyfriend, I see."

"Partner," Ray said, matching her tone. "Life partner, former cop partner, and now local firefighter." He caught a spark of challenge in her eyes, and that was something. She hadn't shown Charlie any more than plain stubbornness and apathy.

"Okay," she said.

"So what if your kids are in trouble?" Charlie asked her softly.

She shook her head. "Then I would've had a call from the Nursing Station or the RCs." She scowled at them. "You two come in here all mysterious-like? Either say what you mean or get out."

"Aww, Trish, don't be like that," Charlie said. "We're just looking into—you know—routine stuff."

"And you only have my best interests in mind," she said sarcastically.

"Right," said Ray. "Come on, Charlie."

Charlie gave her a long look. He seemed a little sad, a little disappointed, but he followed Ray out.

On the way back to the station, Ray said, "You know her pretty well, it looked like."

"Not really," he said. "We aren't close. She's had some hard luck."

"Huh," Ray said, thinking to himself that she seemed exactly as much of a head case as the state of her house made him guess. "Wonder how long it's been since she's seen the kids."

Charlie frowned out the window. "I don't guess we're the guys to sweet-talk that out of her."

Ray grinned. "Yeah, maybe not, but we got a secret weapon called Fraser. He'll get her talking."  


*  


Hiking in the snow sucked a lot after the second hour. Harley and Teague had gotten through the worst of the mountains before the skidoo ran out of gas, but it was still a long haul through the forest, over windy passes and uncertainly frozen rivers, to pick up the highway south from Ross River. She was wondering how dumb it had been to avoid the highway east from Lupine Pass, except with their luck, they would have been picked up by someone who knew them.

"You okay?" Teague asked softly.

"Yeah," she said. He'd asked about twenty times, but she probably had asked him that many times, too. This was scary stuff, and not merely because they were walking through strange wilderness by the light of the moon. The snow cast the light back up from the ground, making everything brighter and casting more shadows at the same time. It was creepy.

"We could stop and sleep," Teague suggested.

"If we can get to the road, we can sleep when someone picks us up."

"Trapped in a small space with a complete stranger."

Harley scanned the dark forest around them and sighed. "Fine, whatever. I want a fire."

"Damn straight," Teague answered.

They split in two directions, each scouting a wide half-circle for likely campsites and nearby risks. The woods here were tall, widely spaced pines free of underbrush, so they had a relatively clear view of their surroundings. Moonlight poured down. Harley found a place where an enormous tree shielded the ground from too much snow. Teague gathered deadfall for a fire and Harley began scooping out a pit.

She wished they'd brought the tent or swiped a new one. The old tent was missing its cross-poles, but they could have maybe rigged something to work. Instead, they had two tarps, some rope, and a sleeping bag. And now that they weren't moving, she was starting to get cold. The night was frigid. She and Teague were relatively tolerant of freezing temperatures, but it made a horrible difference when you stopped moving.

The kindling was a little damp and slow to light. It would be a smoky fire, but that was fine. She stared at the small, flickering flames, willing them to dry out the wood and grow enough to keep them warm.

Behind her, Teague was building a bed of fir branches and pine saplings, shaking off the snow and laying every other branch crosswise. Then he lay one of the tarps down, covering them. The air smelled of fresh-cut evergreen and smoke. The fire popped and crackled as the water boiled out of the wood. She took a bundle of rope from her pack, unwound one end, and secured it to the trunk of the tree in line with the bed.

"Did you cut a pole?" she asked, looking at Teague's work and the stack of gathered firewood.

"Uh-uh," he said around a yawn.

She grunted and went in search of a suitable branch or fallen limb.

When she got back, Teague had the fire built up and a pot of water melting. She jammed the end of their new tent pole in the thawing earth near the fire and anchored it with several rocks. Then she tied off the rope and dug out the tarps.

"Goddamn cold," Teague mumbled, pulling the sleeping bag out of its sack.

"Wish we'd brought two," Harley said.

"Wish we had a million dollars while you're at it."

"Done," she said, rolling her eyes. She turned back to the fire, adjusting the pot on the small logs it rested on and resettling its tin plate lid. They'd been eating on the trail and drinking from their water packs, but they needed to consume something warm before they tried to sleep.

A few minutes later, Teague snapped the other tarp like the top sheet of a bed, only it lay atop the rope. Harley helped him tuck the loose ends under the branches, and they had a low tent, just big enough for the two of them. After they ate, Teague hung the packs high in a tree downwind while Harley cleaned camp. Then they wrestled themselves into the tiny sleeping space they'd made and pulled their coats in to block the two open ends.

"This thing was so not made for two," Harley complained. Her face was an inch from Teague's spine.

"Better than jail," Teague answered.

"Too true," she said. In a couple of minutes she was almost warm, and a little later, with her brother's pulse under her cheek, she was fast asleep.  


*  


Fraser took the call concerning yet another missing skidoo. "Well, I'm sure it'll turn up," he told the irate man on the other end of the line. His name was Sam Bekane, and Fraser was certain he hadn't been a victim or suspect in any of the previous missing snowmobile pranks.

He was about to assure Mr. Bekane that he would have his constables out looking for it post-haste when Bekane said, "I've already looked all over town, Corporal. I asked some folks I know about likely places it might turn up, too. It isn't anywhere."

"Hmm." Fraser sat up straighter and winced at a hard twinge in his back. "I understand, sir. We'll do our best." Then he sent Constable Coleman out to take Mr. Bekane's statement. Diefenbaker, who had insisted on accompanying Fraser to the station that day, eyed Fraser and sniffed.

"Yes, I realize it's worse, thank you."

Dief snorted, but made a concerned mewling noise as he flopped down in front of Fraser.

Happily, from the doorway Fraser saw that Ray and Charlie were just pulling up to the fire station. Dief sprang to his feet, blocking the door, so Fraser waved and waited for them to come in.

Once Ray and Charlie were settled with steaming mugs of coffee, They started the debriefing. "Another snowmobile theft has occurred, but it seems not to be one of the usual pranks."

"Trisha Helkik wouldn't answer when we asked what the last time she'd seen her kids was," Ray said, frowning. "I didn't get the feeling it was within the last couple of days, Fraser. Maybe even longer."

"The house was empty when Ray and I went by this morning," Fraser said to Charlie. "I'm beginning to suspect the worst."

Charlie took off his baseball cap and scratched his head. "I think we need to step this up. We need to find out where they are—if they're hiding out with friends or if they've skipped town."

Ray nodded and got to his feet. "We gotta bring her in."

Fraser nodded. "I agree. However, before we race out to collect Ms. Helkik, allow me to share something else." Ray leaned on the table, not quite willing to sit. Fraser smiled at him indulgently and continued, "While you were gone, I went over to the school and spoke with the principal. She taught the twins when they were younger and portrayed them as intelligent but isolated. Also, there was no Student Advocacy Counselor in Lupine Pass at the time Ms. Helkik canceled her children's high school plans, so they did not in fact have official recourse."

"That sucks," Ray said.

Charlie shook his head in dismay. "What a rotten situation. Those kids didn't ask for this. They deserve better than this."

"How fast can we get a warrant for their house?" Ray asked.

"I'll put in the request right now."

"I'll go knock on their door and look in the windows," Charlie said. "Any footprints will show in the new snow."

"Okay, um, they don't hang out at the community center," Ray hedged, "but I'll head over there and talk to some of the kids. Maybe they know something we don't."

"And if they're gone?" Fraser said.

Charlie shrugged a shoulder. "They're only runaways until we find some hard evidence linking them to a fire, and so far everything's circumstantial."

"I believe we could trail them as subjects of interest," Fraser began.

"Get the warrant," Ray interrupted. "Let's do this up right. Airtight."

Charlie called Fraser from the Helkik driveway ten minutes later. "I have skidoo tracks here in the drive. No one's home, and it looks like no one's been around since you and Ray poked around the house earlier."

"I'll be right there," said Fraser. He and Dief jumped into the RCMP Jeep and sped to the community center to pick up Ray.  


*  


The next day, Teague and Harley found the highway within three hours of setting out. There was no traffic, so they hiked south along the edge of the road. The snow bank on the shoulder was only about chest-high, tops, so walking wasn't too much like going through a tunnel.

"If we have to walk to Calgary…" Harley bitched.

"Jinx, shut up!" Teague snapped back. He was tired and his feet hurt like hell, but all was still except for them and the ravens wheeling in the sky above them. Trees came and went, thinning out as the land changed east of the Pelly Range.

Harley stopped, peering through the mid-morning twilight. "Do you see that?" She was pointing off to the left. It looked like a disused driveway.

"Let's check it out," Teague said.

It was a house. Not a crappy little cabin. Not a hunter's blind. A real house, thank fucking Christ, and it clearly belonged to snowbirds who were gone for the winter. Teague took off his mittens and picked the lock of the mudroom door. Inside it was about twelve degrees Celsius, and it was positively balmy compared to outside.

They took a few minutes to explore the house. There wasn't much of value lying around and the garage was unfortunately empty, but the house was clean and relatively warm. In the kitchen, Harley tested the faucet. After a long moment of singing pipes, water began to flow. "Hot damn, I'm getting a shower," she said.

"Oh, you suck!" That sounded really good now that she'd said it. "Don't use all the hot water."

She rolled her eyes and turned, crossing the room toward the master bedroom. "Check the pantry. I'm hungry."

Yeah, food sounded even better than getting clean. The pantry and cabinets held the usual staples. The deep freeze had some bags of frozen vegetables and a bunch of things wrapped in white paper that didn't have labels. He wondered if they were steaks, but he didn't know how to cook steak if it wasn't on the grill and if there was a grill, it was buried under several feet of snow. Still, they needed calories and other people's food was way better than what they had in their packs.

By the time Harley emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a change of clothes from her backpack, Teague had cobbled together a meal of peas, Kraft dinner, and fried salmon patties. "Flip these in three minutes," he said, pointing at the skillet.

"Smells awesome," she said.

"Don't let them burn," he called. Then he headed to the shower for his own turn. When he came back, Harley had the food on the table along with a jar of almonds, a can of peaches, and two huge cups of water. It wasn't fancy, but it almost felt like it. "We should take the nuts with us," he said.

"Yeah. There's more in there, too."

"Cool." They were too busy eating to talk, and there wasn't much to talk about. There was no sense in freaking each other out all over again.

After they ate, they searched the pantry and cabinets for food they could take that didn't weigh a ton. They put two cans of nuts in a Ziploc and took all the packages of beef jerky they found in the side cabinet by the microwave. Harley looked longingly at the microwave popcorn until Teague said, "It'd be gross cold."

"We could save it 'til the next house," she said.

"I hope to hell we'll have a ride by then," Teague said, folding his arms over his chest. "Unless you really want to fucking walk to Alberta."

Harley scowled at him and slammed the cabinet door. "Whatever, jerkwad. Are you done? We should get out of here."

Which was totally not fair, but Teague was too comfortably full to fight…other than muttering, "Bitch," under his breath.

Regardless, they were ready in about ten minutes. They took a few more to clean up their mess, being too well trained in leaving a campsite better than they found it to do otherwise, and left the way they'd come in, following their tracks back to where they'd left the road. Teague hoped no one would meet them on the highway just then; trespassing wasn't that big a deal if you needed shelter in wintertime, but some people were assholes about it anyway.

"I guess we're walking," Harley said. The sun was up finally, a dim white disk behind the hazy sky.

"Somebody'll show up eventually," he said softly. "They have to."

Harley didn't answer. Teague fell into step behind her.  


*  


The skidoo tracks in the snow outside the Helkik house were pretty damning evidence, as far as Ray was concerned. He knew in his gut that they were the fire setters, but they didn't have any direct evidence. Not yet. Fraser was waiting on a phone call from Whitehorse approving the search warrant of the house. Hopefully it wouldn't be more than a half hour.

Dief sniffed around the yard and looked generally like he'd rather be playing catch with snowballs or chasing rabbits in the woods. "What about," Ray started, interrupting Charlie's monologue on how he couldn't believe two teenage kids could have done all the unsolved fires on Ray's wall in the office. "What about in the woods? Where we left because of that bear?"

"Right you are, Ray." Fraser turned to Dief. "Help us find the twins' secret place, please?" Diefenbaker let out a disdainful bark, and Fraser replied, "Yes, of course I can track them on my own, but I defer to your superior olfactory senses." But Dief had already turned his brushy tail to them and was padding lightly over the snow into the woods. Ray and Charlie shared a grin and followed Fraser on Dief's winding uphill trail.

Within ten minutes, Dief was shoulder-deep into a hole formed by fallen stones and the hollow bole of a tree. "Good boy!" Ray said, kneeling down to drag out what was inside: a can of lighter fluid, a ten-pack of plastic cigarette lighters, some frozen-solid cans of soup, the cellophane wrapper of a pack of cigarettes.

"Huh," said Fraser.

"Dammit," said Ray, getting to his feet.

"Sure wish we could trace that lighter fluid to any of the fires."

"It'd still be weak," Ray argued. "Without witnesses or a confession…"

Fraser's cell phone rang. It was Constable Martin with word that the warrant was approved. "That's excellent, Constable. Please go with Constable Coleman to the Lupine Pass Motel and escort Ms. Helkik to the station. She's wanted as a witness; she is not being charged with anything. Please hold her until our return."

Ray grinned at Fraser; he wanted to kiss him. "Way to delegate," he said.

Fraser blushed and rubbed his eyebrow. Then he said, "Gentlemen, let's execute this search warrant."

Ray picked the lock on the flimsy door with only a little help from Fraser, and the first thing that hit them was the stench of garbage that needed taking out. "Would I be out of line if I said this place is a dump?" Ray said.

Charlie shook his head, but his gaze was focused on the long row of empty liquor bottles collecting filth near the pantry. There was another collection in Trisha's bedroom. They concentrated on the twins' room after that. Some camping gear seemed to be missing, and more clothes were missing from Harley's closet than could be accounted for by the dirty laundry in the hamper. Fraser checked between the mattresses for diaries, but found nothing. There weren't any convenient posters of bonfires on the walls, either. Just the usual pinups you'd expect from a teenage girl. Harley's Distance Program books were in a stack on the floor beside her bed.

In the living room, Charlie called out that he'd found Teague's clothes. "Huh," Ray said, and left the bedroom for Fraser to finish. "Overflow?" he asked Charlie.

"I don't know. They're a little old to be sharing a room like that."

"Yeah." Ray scanned the bookshelf by the sofa. School books. Notebooks. Binders. Ray opened the first and found doodles of campfires drawn in the margins of Teague's school notes. Another was an artist's sketchbook, and it was full of drawings of fire, the forest, camping scenes, and so forth. He flipped forward. Toward the end of the used pages, he found a series of pictures of Wilson's Outfitters on fire. There were other buildings, too: buildings Ray recognized because he'd put out the fires this kid had made.

"We got paydirt," he yelled, so that Fraser would hear him, and Charlie flipped through the book while Ray continued looking.

"Oh dear," Fraser said, when he came to look.

"Yeah," Charlie agreed.

Fraser carefully bagged and tagged the sketchbook. Ray went back to skimming through notebooks. Anarchy symbols were everywhere. Fraser knelt down to help, and Ray was happy to let him. Fraser could do the speed-reading thing while Ray went through the sofa and Charlie finished with the chest of drawers.

In the end, out of the entire house they confiscated several notebooks and several cans of lighter fluid. Fraser also took copious notes on the state of the place, the missing camping gear and clothing, and the contents of the kitchen trashcan, of which the most interesting were the empty packages of cold weather camping food, such as the six-packs of dehydrated stew mix and the large cans of granola trail mix.

"We don't actually gotta go talk to the mother now, do we?" Ray asked.

Fraser pursed his lips, considering. "She may tell us something we don't know."

"She may know where they've gone," Charlie said.

"Yeah, okay," Ray said. "I don't guess they left a big sign saying 'Gone to Whitehorse, back never.' "

"You think they went to Whitehorse?" Fraser asked.

Ray met his eyes quickly; he knew that tone. "I take it you don't."

Fraser shook his head. "They wouldn't need to camp on the way to Whitehorse."

"They could hitch a ride easy enough," Charlie put in. "No one would question them going down to see their friends for a few days."

Ray picked up the thread. "Only, here they've packed up to go out in the middle of nowhere on their own, and packing light if that's all the camping gear they took."

Fraser nodded. "Exactly."  


*  


They'd totally forgotten to look for skis at the house. Harley was reasonably sure there hadn't been any, if only because she thought she would've noticed them. Skis or snowshoes would speed up their trek. But then so would a ride.

When it finally came, it was a truck, a big 18-wheeler with a bright blue cab and plain metal-colored trailer. The pale light of midday was fading into cloudy half-light, and the trees were getting denser the further south they walked. But the big truck stopped and Teague climbed up the steps to the open passenger door and looked in. From the ground, Harley saw a grizzled Métis man wearing a red and yellow woolen toque and a puffy green vest. Strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival drifted down.

"Calgary," Teague was saying, "or as near to it as you're going." Then the guy was shaking Teague's hand, and Teague's hand was in hers, hauling her in.

Teague sat in the middle, and it took Harley a minute to get her bearings before she could shake off the strangeness of being so high up off the ground. "Hi," she said finally, and introduced herself.

The driver was named Doug, and he was, in fact, headed to Calgary. He was also about three hours behind schedule, so he hoped they had some snacks on them because he wouldn't be stopping until they got out of the Yukon. "Sounds great," Harley said. She felt suddenly exhausted. Or maybe it was the relief of not walking for a while. Whatever, she was asleep before the end of the next song on the album.  


*  


The suspects' mother was yelling at Constable Martin when Fraser returned to the station with Ray and Charlie. Fraser turned all the evidence over to Constable Coleman to register. "I'd like to speak to Ms. Helkik alone," he said to Ray and Charlie. He didn't see how it would help to gang up on her from the outset, and he didn't want to fuel her antagonism further.

"Right," said Ray. "You change your mind, just say so."

"Thank you kindly, Ray," he said, smiling.

In the interview room, Trisha Helkik was glowering into her coffee. There was a swirl of creamer on the surface and no steam. Fraser knocked twice on the door and went in. "I apologize for keeping you waiting, Ms. Helkik. My name is Benton Fraser, and—"

"I know who you are, Corporal," she said with a sneer. "Everyone in town's heard the stories of the mighty Mountie and his Chicago cop boyfriend. Now listen to me. You can't hold me here like this. I didn't do nothing."

Fraser sighed. "Ma'am, I'm afraid this is about your children."

"What about them?" Panic lit her bloodshot eyes and her fists clenched tight.

Fraser smiled as gently as he could, pulling out the chair opposite and sitting down. "Are you aware of your children's present location?"

"If they aren't at home, they're haring around town. They don't tell me anything."

"I see. Would you happen to know where they go when you say 'haring around town?' The community center, perhaps? Some friend's house?"

She shrugged. "They go to movies at the center sometimes. That Tova Winn girl used to run with my kids a good deal. They might go to her place."

Fraser nodded. "Thank you." It was a name, at least. "When was the last time you saw Teague and Harley?"

Ms. Helkik drummed her fingers on the table. "I work some odd hours sometimes, and the kids are teenagers—you know how teenagers are. They've been going out before I wake up lately. I don't know how they turned out to be morning people, but there you are."

"So your last contact with either of them…would you say it was today? Yesterday? Last week?" Fraser prompted.

Her eyes shifted and he gave her a moment either to dredge up a memory or a lie. Softly, she said, "Teague said something about groceries three or four days ago."

Fraser nodded and gave her an approving smile. Inwardly, he felt his emotions roiling, and he couldn't help his next question. "Tell me, is their father involved in their lives at all?"

"That lying son of a bitch? No way."

"And his name would be?"

She hedged for several minutes before admitting his name. "I don't want to make no trouble for him," she said. "He can make a lot of trouble for me, you know. I just leave him be and him and his family don't get in my way either."

Fraser pretended to nod with understanding and sympathy, but inside he was fuming. "Have either Teague or Harley ever been involved in a fire, Ms. Helkik?"

She went stiff. "No," she said. "Charlie Montaigne and your Yank came and asked a bunch of questions before. You guys don't know what you're talking about. My kids wouldn't set fire to people's buildings. They're good kids. They know better than that."

It sounded weak to Fraser, but he didn't press it. He had one last question. "Do you know whether they have any family or good friends who live in the south, or even in the United States?"

"No," she said, and this time she looked baffled. "They have friends down in Whitehorse—or old classmates, at least. Can't say they were on great terms with any of them."

"Is that why you canceled their enrollment in high school?"

She cast him a shrewd look and then shrugged. "That's a family matter between me and them."

There was nothing else to do but thank her and let her go. And duck through the door to the fire station before Constable Coleman handed her her copy of the search warrant and the itemized list of everything they had taken.

Fraser found Ray playing with Dief, alternately chasing him and being chased around the fire engine. They both stopped, skidding in their tracks, when they saw Fraser.

"Well?" Ray demanded.

"She hasn't seen them in approximately three days, she doesn't know where they hang out, she hasn't yet realized they're gone, and the only out of town friends she could think of are in Whitehorse." Fraser turned to Charlie. "She did mention a Tova Winn as a friend of the twins'. Does that seem possible?"

"Yeah," Charlie said. "I think it might."

"Good. If you could check that out, Ray and I will see how far we can track Harley and Teague." Diefenbaker barked, and Fraser sighed. "And Dief, of course."

"Of course," Ray said, smiling. He looked happy; he looked beautiful.

Then Fraser's cell phone rang.  


*  


"Oh no," said Ray. "Tell me you are kidding me."

Mae laughed; it was a rich sound in the predawn gloom of the Lupine Pass airport's little hangar. "Ye of little faith."

"Oh, I got plenty of faith, believe me. Faith in gravity!"

She smiled. "I have respect for gravity and faith in the wind."

Fraser cleared his throat. "You said the snowmobile was abandoned on the river?"

"About three hundred kilometers away east-southeast, as the crow flies. Maybe four-fifty by land."

"Toward Edmonton?" Fraser asked.

She nodded. "Or Calgary. It might be easier for them to hide there."

Fraser helped guide the plane out onto the runway, and then helped Ray inside. Mae did her flight check thing and then they were off. The sun was up by the time they reached the abandoned snowmobile. There was a bunch of stuff scattered around it that had Fraser making hmm-ing sounds in the copilot's seat. "What?" said Ray, "Give me the telescope."

"They continued on foot," Fraser said, scanning the east bank of the frozen river before passing the eyeglass to Ray. Ray saw a bunch of discarded stuff on the ice. A gas can stood out, but he wasn't sure what the rest was.

"So they could get to the highway from here?" Ray asked.

"It would be an awfully cold hike," said Mae.

"But not impossible, especially for two healthy young people who believe they have no other choice."

"Right," Ray said. He gave the scope back to Fraser, letting their fingers brush together. They'd made love the night before, sweet and with something akin to relief. They were on the verge of catching them. The arsons would stop. Ray would be able to stop worrying about people trying to burn down his town. Fraser could stop putting off his doctor's appointment for his spine, and Ray could stop pretending he wasn't keeping track of every wince and twinge he caught on Fraser's face.

It occurred to him suddenly that Fraser wasn't cleared for field duty anymore. Stubborn damn Mountie. Ray decided not to mention it. They'd already come this far, after all.

Eventually they reached the highway. With the exception of a few vehicles moving slowly over the snowy road, it was empty.

They followed it south for quite a ways, but they didn't see any hitchhikers.  


*  


Teague figured Doug was okay, even if he did like classic rock more than anybody should. At least it wasn't country. They talked a little, when songs that kind of sucked came on the player, and eventually Teague dozed off. He and Harley got out to pee and to get cokes when Doug stopped at truck stops, and they had an argument while they shared a cigarette over how much money to give him to pay him for the ride. Harley made a guess at what bus fare would be. Teague countered that it was obviously a free favor.

Teague was glad they didn't give him any cash right then, though. When they got to Dawson Creek, Doug pulled into a broad rest stop and put the rig into park. "Why are we stopping?" Harley asked.

Doug yawned. "I've maxed out my drive-time for today. Law says I have to sleep, so here goes. Keep your seat; I'll use the side door."

Teague wasn't sure what he meant until Doug opened the driver's side door and then opened the door to the little cabin behind the front seat. A second later, his face appeared between the curtains behind the middle seat. "If you two want to spread out and crash, go ahead.

Crap, Teague thought. He looked at Harley. She was looking at the handful of other trucks lined up with their running lights on. She shook her head minutely. "Yeah, I think we need to keep moving, Doug. Sorry."

Doug was sorry to see them go, but he wished them luck and was happy enough to take the twenty Harley offered him. Then Teague and Harley slung their packs and descended into the cold morning air. It wasn't dawn yet, but the eastern sky was a little more blue than black. The moon was already down and the sky was rife with stars. They went to the building first, aiming for bathrooms and snack machines. Teague brushed his teeth in a water fountain, and they both rearranged their layers for hiking in the snow again.

The Alaska Highway turned into Highway 2. They started walking, but there wasn't any traffic. Later, they were passed by several cars. One stopped, offering a ride as far as Grande Prairie. They took it, said thanks, and an hour and a half later, they were walking again and watching the sky turn bright in the distance.

"So do we take 40 south or 43 east to Edmonton?" Harley asked.

"Highway 40 goes up into the mountains."

"Okay, forget that idea."

"Lots of people ought to be going from Edmonton to Calgary," Teague said.

"Hope so," Harley answered as they backtracked north to pick up 43.

Before they left Grande Prairie, they stopped at a pancake house and shared a huge breakfast. Afterwards, they had to dodge a curious cop, probably wondering why they weren't in school. Then they zigzagged over to the highway and started trying to hitch.

It was a lot of walking at first. The sun was bright in their eyes and once they left the suburbs behind, the land was flat farmland all around them. Eventually they found themselves getting rides in farm trucks going from one plot of land to another. It wasn't fast, but it was a little nicer than walking. No one seemed to want to take them all the way to Edmonton, though.

They were walking again when the plane came.  


*  


"I see them," Fraser said into the comfortable silence that had fallen around them.

"You what?" Ray said, startled out of a half-doze.

"Got it," Mae said, and the plane turned in a sharp circle under her hands.

They landed on the highway tarmac, which was conveniently empty, and pulled into the first driveway ahead of the Helkik twins, who stood in mute astonishment until they saw Fraser get out of the plane. Mae and Ray emerged behind him and together they converged on Harley and Teague.

"Come on, guys, it's time to go back," Ray said, stepping forward with the sort of purpose he used to use with people in Chicago. Ray the unstoppable force, Fraser thought fondly.

"We don't have to," Teague said. He moved a little in front of his sister, and Fraser ached a little for him.

"You're in over your heads," Fraser said. "We're here to help."

"Oh please," Harley said. "Mounties don't help people like us. You just want to send us to jail."

"Oh yeah?" Ray asked, drawing closer to them, "Why'd he want to send you to jail?"

"Dude, you're with him!" Teague said.

"I'm not a cop anymore. I want to be a cop, I gotta go back to the States."

The twins exchanged a look as if having a conversation with their eyes. They didn't look happy. Or convinced.

Fraser said, "I'm afraid I'm duty-bound to place you under arrest for the arson of numerous properties in the vicinity of Lupine Pass. Now—"

"That's how you're here to help?" Harley yelled, backing away. "That's bullshit!"

Ray took three quick steps and handcuffed Teague; there was a skirmish, but Fraser didn't stop to watch. Instead, he took off in a run after Harley. She slid down the embankment in a blur of snow and gravel. Fraser leapt to follow, but he landed on something unstable under the snow, a loose rock or piece of roadside garbage, and his feet went out from under him.

"Fraser!" Ray shouted as he went down.

The pressure on his spine was excruciating. It felt startlingly like being shot had the first time.

"Mae! It's his back," Ray called, and a moment later, Ray and Teague were sliding down the embankment to where Fraser lay. "You," Ray snapped at Teague, "are going to do every goddamned thing I tell you to, got it?"

Teague's eyes were enormous and terrified. "Yes, sir," he said softly.

"Call your sister back here," Ray said.

Teague gaped at him.

Ray bugged his eyes out at Teague, mocking him. "You think she'll get far without you? You think you'll get far without her? Call her name."

After a long moment, Teague turned. There were many meters' distance between them, but Harley had stopped and was facing them. Fraser imagined she was trying to decide what to do.

Teague held out his wrists, palm up, so she could see the handcuffs.

Fraser saw her curse and kick at a snow-covered hummock of winter wheat. Teague waited. For several moments Fraser worried she wouldn't return, that she was at heart a traitor even to one she loved so dearly, that she would endanger Ray by attempting to escape over the prairies. But, at last, Harley adjusted her backpack and began walking slowly toward them.

A few moments later, Mae arrived with a folding aluminum backboard from the plane's emergency supplies. "Harley, step it up," Mae yelled. "We need your help." Harley moved faster, shoving her way through the snow.

"Mae…?" Fraser asked.

"I radioed for an ambulance, but it's going to be a few minutes. Now, we're getting you up out of the snow." She turned to the twins. "Kids, find me a path up the bank with good footholds. Do it fast."

Ray was already helping Mae unfold the stretcher and secure the sections. With an effort they grasped Fraser's coat and uniform pants and heaved him gently over to the backboard. Three straps buckled him to it, and when he felt the slack pull tight, Fraser knew there was nothing else he could do. They'd caught the culprits. It was time to go under the knife.

It took the four of them to get Fraser safely up to the road. Fraser was nearly delirious with pain, but as the sound of a siren reached them from a distance, he heard Ray telling the children they had done good, that he'd get them all the leniency he could.  


*  


"Are they going to put us in jail?" Harley asked over the noise of the plane.

Mae looked over her shoulder and smiled. "Nope. Or not for very long, at least."

"If we gave you a thousand dollars, would you take us somewhere they'll never find us?" Teague said.

"And where'd you get a thousand dollars?" Mae asked.

"Our sperm donor," Teague said against Harley's admonishing, "Teague!"

"Don't tell!" Harley demanded.

"Why not?" said Mae.

"Because he's never given us a damned thing 'til now."

"But will you?" Teague repeated.

Mae shook her head. "Can't do that. Charlie and a constable are going to be waiting and they'll know if I show up without you."

"Oh." Teague sat back and had the look on his face that meant he was trying not to cry. Harley knew exactly how he felt.

After a while, Harley said, "Mae, why did you say we wouldn't be in jail for long?"

"Because," Mae said slowly, "I'm going to talk to the elders for you."

"Really?" Harley said.

"But why?" said Teague.

"We're all Dene, right? You've had no dad and a sad excuse for a mother—and some of that is Trish's fault and some of it isn't—but I think you two need help more than you need punishing."

Harley's tears finally pushed over the edge. Teague pulled her close for a couple of minutes before letting her go. Teague wiped surreptitiously at his own eyes and said, "What if they say no?"

Mae shrugged. "Won't know unless we try."

When they landed, they thanked her and went quietly with Constable Martin and Mr. Montaigne. Constable Martin rearrested them, just to be sure it was legit, and somebody called their mother. The jail was upstairs above the RCMP office, but no one else was in it, so it wasn't so bad. It was blessedly quiet until their mom arrived. After that, things got ugly, but when the screaming got really bad, a constable came and said she had to leave.

Each time a constable came up to check on them or feed them or whatever, either she or Teague asked if they knew how Corporal Fraser was yet. They didn't.

"You know I had to run, right?" she asked when Constable Coleman had gone.

Teague looked up from the other cell. "Yeah, don't worry about it."

"I didn't mean to hurt him."

"Please, you didn't see him fall. Whatever he landed on went out from under him. It's not like you caused it."

"Really?"

"Duh," Teague said.

Harley felt some more tears welling up. The day had been a stupid emotional rollercoaster. It was crazy. She was ready to crawl into a hole and hide for a year. She lay down on her bunk. "I can't go back there, though. She's an evil bitch and I hate her."

"Prison might be better," Teague agreed. "At least we'd be away from her."

"Away from all her crazy theories of who we're fucking."

Teague snorted. "No kidding."

"I hope Corporal Fraser's okay," she said.

"Me too. Go to sleep, Harl, you're worn out."

"Keep watch?" she asked softly.

"Yeah, I got it."  


*  


Ray was asleep in the waiting room, his head tipped back against the wall, when Fraser finally came out of surgery. The doctor woke him with a gentle, "Mr. Kowalski?" that still managed to startle the daylights out of him.

The doctor handed him the cup of coffee he'd rescued from Ray's flailing limbs. "Here you go."

"Fraser?" Ray said, blinking.

"He's in the recovery room, but we'll be moving him to a private room shortly."

"Okay, good. Can he move? He's not, you know, paralyzed?"

"He's still asleep, but his reflexes were strong. If he allows the nerves to heal properly, then we should expect a full recovery."

"Oh, thank God," Ray said. "That's great news."

The doctor told him a nurse would get him when Fraser had a room, and then left. Ray called Charlie first and told him the good news. Then he called the Lupine Pass RCMP station because the constables would want to know. Then he called Maggie. She wasn't there, but he left a message that probably sounded as elated as his last one was terrified. Then he called Vecchio, because he and Fraser were still friends and Vecchio ought to be told that his bullet was finally out of Fraser's back. He was about to call his mom when a nurse appeared calling his name.

Fraser looked terrible: he was all pale and pinched around the eyes. He also looked beautiful, mostly because he was alive and breathing. Ray kissed Fraser's forehead, cheek, and lips, and murmured, "Are you awake?"

"Hi, Ray," Fraser answered. He smiled widely and his pupils were blown.

"How do you feel?" Ray was patting him down from shoulders to feet.

"Fuzzy."

"Move your feet for me?" Ray said. Fraser rocked his feet from side to side under the blanket. "That's great," he said.

"Oh yes," Fraser said.

"Vecchio said for you to call him when you're awake."

Fraser's eyes drifted shut, then popped open. "You called Ray Vecchio?"

Ray shrugged. "Had to. You were partners."

Fraser reached for Ray's hand and pulled it to his mouth. There were words in the kiss he laid there but Ray couldn't hear or see them, and Fraser fell asleep a moment later.

Ray figured that was okay. He knew what Fraser had meant to say anyway.  


*  


It was a week before Fraser was deemed well enough to be transferred to the Lupine Pass Nursing Station to complete his convalescence. Ray would have preferred to have Fraser at home, but he knew there would be too much temptation there for Fraser to overdo it and damage the healing nerve tissue. It meant Ray spent a whole lot of time there.

Back in Edmonton, Fraser and Ray had exchanged several long phone conversations with Charlie, Mae, Lena Tom—Laynie's grandmother, the Lupine Pass constables, and—once—Trisha Helkik. They didn't get to talk to Harley or Teague, but Constables Coleman and Martin both assured them that the twins asked after Fraser's health constantly and wished him the best.

When Fraser was settled in at the Nursing Station, Mrs. Tom called a council of all the elders of the community right there in Fraser's ward. In addition, the constables, Charlie, Red Wilson, Warren Jakes, Sam Bekane, and the twins attended, as did Mae Cantrell as the kids' advocate. No one tried to pry Ray from the room, so he figured he was invited too.

Harley and Teague stood up. "My brother and I are guilty of setting fires," Harley said, and Teague listed all the buildings they had burned or tried to burn down. "We did this on purpose because we were angry at everything."

"And because we felt trapped," Teague added.

"We are also guilty of taking Mr. Bekane's skidoo and running away," said Harley. "We entered an empty house and used their water and food without leaving payment for it."

Teague said, "I am guilty of going to Sully Ross and demanding a thousand dollars from him or else I would tell the RCMP he never gave us any child support. Harley didn't know until afterwards." Then they sat down.

Fraser spoke from his bed. "I am guilty of failing to protect minors in my jurisdiction from neglect and self-harm."

Mrs. Tom stood and said, "We are guilty of failing to protect our community's children, the blood of our people. An old scandal, perhaps, kept us quiet when we should have looked for a cause for Harley and Teague distancing themselves from their friends. When they did not go to Whitehorse with their classmates, we failed to look for the underlying problem."

Mae stood and spoke. "Trisha Helkik refused to attend this meeting. So did Sully Ross, the children's biological father. I do not speak for them. I am guilty of seeing a woman of our blood spiral downward and failing to speak to anyone with the authority to intervene for the sake of her children. I believe Harley and Teague to be victims of neglect. I believe their crimes should be resolved within our Nation instead of prosecuting them in the Yukon courts."

"I concur," Fraser said, and the whole room seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

It took hours for them to come to an initial decision. The kids would be remanded to the custody of Mrs. Tom for the time being, and they'd be doing community service in Lupine Pass while finishing their high school diplomas. They didn't agree on how long the community service should last, but eventually the Nursing Station staff booted everyone but Ray out. The elders would reconvene somewhere else, but Ray didn't much care. Fraser's part was over except to witness the final decision at the end, but that might not be for days yet.

When everyone was gone, Ray leaned down and laid a gentle kiss on Fraser's lips, then another and another.

Fraser blinked up at him looking happily dazed. "What was that for?"

Ray tried to perch on the edge of the bed without pushing Fraser over; Fraser edged himself a few inches to the left anyway. "You."

Fraser smiled. "I'm glad. Can I ask why?"

Ray shrugged. "Just glad to be here. Glad you're all in one piece, too."

"I am, too." Fraser reached out and pulled Ray in for another kiss, sweet and intent.

"And," Ray said, tipping his head back, "you know, we solved the case. That was pretty cool."

Fraser nodded. "It was."

"And you get to come home soon, too."

They heard someone clearing their throat from the doorway and looked up. "Corporal, you are not cleared for physical exertion," said Nicole.

"But—" Ray said.

"Doctor's orders," she said, and waited until he sat back before turning her back and going back to her desk.

Ray scowled. "That was mean."

Fraser laughed. "She's only doing her job."

"Can't wait to get you home, lay you down in bed and give you the least physically exerting blowjob you've ever had."

Ray thought he heard Fraser whimper, but then Fraser grasped a handful of Ray's shirt and pulled him forward, down, into another long, thorough kiss.

  



End file.
